Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso belongs to the first generation of Portuguese modernist painters, standing out for the exceptional quality of his work and the dialogue he established with the historical avant-gardes of the early 20th century.
Born in Mancelos (Amarante) on November 14, 1887, he died on October 25, 1918, in Espinho, victim of pneumonic epidemic that devastated Europe at the end of the World War I.
The death at the age of 30 dictated the abrupt end of a pictorial work in full maturity and a promising international career, but still in the affirmation phase.
Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso had a short and intense life in Paris, where he made contacts with modernist artists, and returned to Portugal at the beginning of the World War I as a painter recognized in avant-garde circles.
He participated in group exhibitions in Paris, Berlin, New York, Chicago, Boston and London, and exhibited and sold his work in the United States, being considered, by the American art critic Robert Loescher, “one of the most well-kept from the beginning of modern art”.
In 2016, more than 40 thousand people visited the exhibition dedicated to Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso at the Soares dos Reis National Museum, in Porto (which later went to the Chiado Museum, in Lisbon), and, in the same year, at the Grand Palais, in Paris, another exhibition brought together around 250 works by the artist in painting, drawing and engraving.
The exhibition at Soares dos Reis National Museum was a recreation of another solo that Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso held in Porto, in 1916, in the former Passos Manuel Garden.