The Modern Novel

Biography

José de Almada Negreiros was born in São Tomé and Príncipe in 1893. His father was Portuguese and his mother SãoTomean. His mother died when he was three and he was sent to a boarding school near Lisbon. He started out as an artist and had his first individual exhibition when he was twenty. He published his first poems soon after, thereby becoming one of the vanguard of modernist artists and writers in Portugal. At this time, he also choreographed a ballet.

In 1917 he published Ultimatum Futurista, às gerações portuguezas do século XX, his futurist manifesto and published the first and only edition of Portugal Futurista, which contained his obscene (equine sex) novel Saltimbancos. After World War I, he lived in Paris where he worked as a ballet dancer. He returned to Lisbon two years later and then went to Madrid. In 1934 he returned to Portugal for good.

De Almada Negreiros was multi-talented and will be remembered above all for his art, but also for his drama, poetry, novels, manifestos, ballet choreography and for his artistic and political criticism of the Establishment. He said of his own work I draw, I write, I sculpt, I do stained glass, I dance, I do theatre, I do cinema, and, if my art doesn’t speak through any of these voices, what can we do then? Just pretend that I am already dead – and that I left behind these posthumous works. He is very little known in the English-speaking world and virtually none of his work has been translated into English. He died in 1970.

Other sites

José de Almada Negreiros
My blog post on his Porto exhibition
José de Almada Negreiros (about his art)
José de Almada Negreiros (about his art)
José de Almada Negreiros (selection of his art)
José de Almada Negreiros (in Portuguese)
José de Almada Negreiros (in Portuguese)
José de Almada Negreiros (in Portuguese)
José de Almada Negreiros (in Portuguese)