Amadeo was born in Manhufe, Amarante, in 1887 and moved to Lisbon at the age of 18 to attend Architecture. However, he was not satisfied, so the following year he went to Paris and developed an interest for painting, he attended free academies and the atelier of the Catalan painter Anglada-Camarsa. Very critical of "his Portuguese comrade friends, who marched in an old-fashioned way" — he vents in a letter to his uncle Francisco — "everything that is done here is mediocre apart from very few things", ended up partnering with Amedeo Modigliani, which opened his horizons to other modern ways.
In 1912 he published the album XX Dessins, which obtained a warm critical reception and gave him his first appearance in the Parisian news, soon reinforced by his participation in the XXVII e XXVIII Salons des Independents. The following year he received an invitation from the reputed American critic Walter Pach to join the first exhibition of modern art in the USA, the Armory Show of 1913, alongside the great figures of the coeva generation, such as Braque, Duchamp or Matisse, and the previous generation, where Cézanne, Gaugin, Renoir or Van Gogh pontificated.
Amadeo returned to Portugal in 1914 to escape war and settled in Manhufe, in a prosperous farm belonging to his father’s family, where he continued his investigation in visual arts, maintaining little contact, and at a distance, with the modernists from Lisbon and Porto.
In 1916, Amadeo decided to show his work in Portugal and organized an exhibition with 114 painting in Porto, in the gardens of Passos Manuel. He names it “Painting Exhibitions” (Abstractionism) Amadeo de Souza Cardoso" and, open until late at night, it was visited by 30,000 people during the twelve days it was open. The unusuality of the paintings scandalized many and, in a haughty way, Amadeo faced insults, assault and even alleged spitting on his paintings. The exhibition was then moved to Lisbon, where it got praised in the press by young Almada Negreiros and granted Amadeo a notorious interview in the newspaper O Dia, where he largely quoted the Futuristic Manifest of Marinetti.
Amadeo died in 1918, victim of the Spanish flu, without fulfilling his long-desired return to Paris. His very short career, which lasted less than seven years, still allowed him to firm a well-creased identity, which remained as he moved from synthetic Cubism to analytical Cubism, from uncompromised Futurism to pioneering Expressionism or from the romantic resonance of his early pieces to a more radical abstractionism.
Título desconhecido (Clown, Cavalo, Salamandra), 1911
Guache sobre papel, Colecção Gulbenkian
Título desconhecido (Castelo), 1911
Óleo sobre Tela, Colecção Gulbenkian
Lévriers / Os Galgos, 1911
Óleo sobre Tela, Colecção Gulbenkian
LA DÉTENTE DU CERF (Desenho original para o album XX DESSINS, nº 14,1912), 1912
Aguada, Tinta-da-china e Grafite sobre papel, Colecção Gulbenkian
Cosinha da Casa de Manhufe, 1913
Óleo sobre madeira, Colecção Gulbenkian
Procession Corpus Christi / Procissão Corpus Christi, 1913
Óleo sobre madeira, Colecção Gulbenkian
Título desconhecido, 1913
Óleo sobre Tela, Colecção Gulbenkian
Título desconhecido (barcos), 1913
Óleo sobre Tela, Colecção Gulbenkian
Título desconhecido, 1913
Óleo sobre cartão prensado, Colecção Gulbenkian
Canção popular – a Russa e o Figaro, 1916
Óleo sobre Tela, Colecção Gulbenkian
Vida dos Instrumentos, 1916
Óleo sobre Tela,Colecção Gulbenkian
Título desconhecido (Entrada), 1917
Tela, Espelho, Madeira, Cola, Areia, Óleo e Colagem, Colecção Gulbenkian