Painting 1914

Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso made this painting with a mixture of intuition, intellect, and maybe even a bit of stubbornness. It has these ghostly marks and a palette that's kind of earthy yet somehow floating. I can imagine Souza-Cardoso thinking hard, moving paint around, adding, scraping, trying to nail something down. He was part of that generation of artists that were busting apart forms, right? I see this brown, almost anchor-like shape near the bottom, holding the painting down, while all these geometric shapes seem to float above. It’s like he’s trying to ground the ungroundable. There's this one red stripe that zings through the middle – it's off-kilter, but it holds the whole shebang together. It's like a dare, a spark, a little "fuck you" to the old ways. He’s playing with surface and depth, letting the paint do its thing. I wonder what Picasso or Braque would have made of it? Artists are all in conversation with each other, don’t you think?