JÚLIO POMAR, mista sobre aglomerado, 122 x 199 cm

JÚLIO POMAR, mista sobre aglomerado, 122 x 199 cm
JÚLIO POMAR, Júlio Artur da Silva Pomar (1926-2018) "March" Tempera on chipboard Signed and dated 1952 Dim. approx.: 122 x 199 cm. Faults and faults. Framed (defects). It appears in the publication Catalog Raisonné I, Júlio Pomar, cat. 86, pg. 85. Alexandre Pomar wrote about this work in the publication: THE IMPRECISE DRAWING OF EVERY HUMAN FACE, REFLECTED! - Portraits by Júlio Pomar, Documenta, Lisbon 2021 as part of an exhibition curated by Sara Antónia de Matos and Pedro Faro. Writes Alexandre Pomar in this catalogue: "MARCHA, 1952 - To review neo-realism The second militant part of Pomar's neo-realist decade (1945-1955). From political prints to the Rice Cycle Never exhibited until now and never mentioned before, although included in 2004 in the Raisonné Catalog thanks to the artist's memory, Marcha is a political allegory and a group portrait, which retrospectively highlights the figure of José Dias Coelho, sculptor and activist communist who would be assassinated by the PIDE in 1961. Recognizable among the figures of the couple who advance in the foreground, it occupies a central place corresponding at the time to its position as an activist who animated the interventions of PCP artists in the early 50's (or was it even the its informal controller, a non-sectarian controller, as Júlio Pomar told me.) (...) (...) In 1952 March had to be a clandestine work: it was the Soviet side of a paralegal trench, animated in a atelier and gathering active in period of strong police repression and censorship that took place during and after the presidential candidacies of Norton de Matos and Ruy Luís Gomes (in 1949 and 1951, respectively). That year the SNBA was closed and the sequence of the General Exhibitions was interrupted, because Eduardo Malta had been expelled from membership due to a public conflict with Dias Coelho. It was also the time of the internal polemics of neo-realism, around the orientation of the Vertex, as a result of a «sectarian deviation» that fractured the intellectual circles, with a PC weakened by many prisons. (...) Even if the pamphlet condition makes it difficult to classify it as a «masterpiece», this is a bigger picture, and not just because the ambition of the subject and the large format coincide, unheard of at the time. The encounter between the political manifesto and the group portrait, of a very precise moment and place (the atelier in Praça da Alegria, as we will see), gives it a practical truth and an emotional intensity that is fusional with the formal qualities that the they certainly make one of the most outstanding pieces of neo-realism, which is identified there with the broad field of socialist realism, although without academic concession. It is a very representative work of a political time and its contingencies, it is a unique piece in the painter's career (...) The second period, from Mulheres na Lota (Nazaré) in 1951, recovers the austere firmness of an interventionist social realism, certainly sensitive to the aesthetic debate that arrived from France, but with independence; the artist made his first trip to Paris that year and there he found Pignon, Fougeron and Taslitzky, but he left no evidence of what he saw, only references to the names. Some key works were left to mark that new orientation and Marcha is its flag. In the same year, Mário Dionísio published his Encontros em Paris in Vértice, where he dialogued with great reserve with the three aforementioned painters, and in 1952 he left the PCP, following the conflict over the collaborations of communists in the magazine Ler, of Publicações Europa-América. . (...) WHO IS WHO Look at the painting. Marcha, understood as a group portrait, identifies without expressly representing the atelier of Praça da Alegria (former atelier that was once owned by José Malhoa), rented and headed by the sculptor Vasco Pereira da Conceição, a militant and former political prisoner, who recognizes himself to enter the scene from the right edge of the frame. Maria Barreira, his wife, also worked there, certainly referred to by Maternity, on the lower right, which is a common theme in the sculpture of the childless couple.