Almada Negreiros | |
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Almada Negreiros at the 1st Futurist Conference, April 1917.
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Born |
Roça Saudade, Trindade, São Tomé |
April 7, 1893
Died | July 15, 1970 Hospital de São Luís dos Franceses, Lisbon |
Occupation | Painter, writer |
Genre | novel, play, poem, essays and pamphletary manifests |
Literary movement | Futurism |
Spouse | Sarah Afonso |
José Sobral de Almada Negreiros (April 7, 1893 – June 15, 1970) was a Portuguese artist. He was born in the colony of Portuguese São Tomé and Príncipe, the son of a Portuguese father, António Lobo de Almada Negreiros, and a Santomean mother, Elvira Freire Sobral. Besides literature and painting, Almada developed ballet choreographies, and worked on tapestry, engraving, murals, caricature, mosaic, azulejo and stained glass.
His mother died in 1896. In 1900 he entered a Jesuit boarding school in Campolide, Lisbon. After the October 1910 republican revolution the school was closed and Almada entered the Escola Internacional, also in Lisbon.
In 1913 he had his first individual exhibition, showing 90 drawings. In 1915, along with Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro, he published poems and texts in the Orpheu artistic magazine, which would introduce modernist literature and art in Portugal. This same year Almada Negreiros wrote the famous Manifesto Anti-Dantas e por extenso, a humorous attack against a more traditionalist and bourgeois older generation. In 1915 the artist also conceived the O Sonho da Rosa ballet.
In 1917, with the aim of introducing the Portuguese public to Futuristic aesthetics, Almada Negreiros published, together with Santa-Rita Pintor, the Portugal Futurista magazine, writing the Ultimatum Futurista, às gerações portuguezas do século XX ("Futurist ultimatum to the Portuguese generations of the 20th century"). He promoted a conference, the Sessão Futurista ("Futurist Session"), where he appeared wearing a flight suit.