The Public Ministry closed the investigation into the disappearance of 94 works from the State's contemporary art collection, the Attorney General's Office (PGR) revealed to the Lusa agency this Tuesday. The DGPC report warned that “the existence of works to be located constituted a weakness in the collection” of contemporary art. Among the works of art whose whereabouts are unknown are engravings, drawings, paintings, sculptures, among others, José de Guimarães, Malangatana, Xana, Helena Almeida, Jorge Pinheiro, Abel Manta, Júlio Pomar It is Graça Morais. Started in 1976, the so-called SEC collection – currently the State Contemporary Art Collection – brings together around a thousand works mainly by Portuguese artists, such as Helena Almeida, Julião Sarmento, José de Guimarães, Abel Manta, Júlio Pomar, Ilda David, Noronha da Costa. It also includes foreign artists such as Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe and Sebastião Salgado, being spread across various public bodies, cultural and non-cultural, in Portugal and abroad.
Helena de Almeida
The investigation had been opened in July 2020 by the Department of Investigation and Criminal Action (DIAP) in Lisbon, after the Ministry of Culture sent a report from the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage (DGPC) to the Public Prosecutor's Office to determine the whereabouts of the missing works. Contacted by Lusa, a source from the PGR press office indicated that the investigation in question “was ordered to be archived”. The DGPC report reported 94 works of art from the former SEC Collection (Secretariat of State for Culture) with unknown whereabouts, and another 18 works of art “whose location is not known, or needs to be rectified with the Portuguese Photography Center.” , in Port. At the time, the Minister of Culture, Graça Fonseca, had announced the sending of the report to the Public Ministry, justifying that the department did not have investigative powers and, therefore, the document would be “forwarded to the appropriate authorities”. For its part, the PGR sent the document to DIAP in Lisbon, where it led to an inquiry, an official source contacted by Lusa said in July: “This process is under investigation and is subject to external judicial secrecy”, said that source.
José de Guimarães
“The constant movement of works in circulation throughout more than four decades of the collection’s existence, was not always accompanied by the indispensable documentary record and inventory”, read the report, validated by the then general director of the Cultural Heritage, Paula Silva. The collection's previous official inventory document, dated 2011, recorded 170 works whose location was unknown. In this new inventory, records were updated and purged, and information on the whereabouts of works of art was clarified, with the DGPC reaching the sum of 94 works, some of which are uncertain. Another 18 photography works also have an unknown location, but were not taken into account in this inventory, because they are not under the jurisdiction of the DGPC, although they are of a public nature, as they are part of the collection of the Portuguese Photography Center, under the management of the Directorate- General Book, Archives and Libraries.
Andy Warhol
The Ministry of Culture's contemporary art collection is dispersed across organizations such as embassies, regional directorates of Culture, but the majority is found at the Serralves Foundation (553 works), in Porto, at the Aveiro City Council (159) and at the Belém Cultural Center (37), in Lisbon.
Wassily Kandinsky and abstractionism
One of the pioneers in abstract art, Wassily Kandinsky paved the way for the artists who followed him in this artistic field. His paintings have been described as "visual music", as through color and line, he expressed how music made him feel. Fascinated by the association between color and music, he even composed music for his works. The artist sought to provoke an emotional response in the viewer without the constraining influence of defined objects and physical boundaries. Discover in this article how Wassily Kandinsky, through his works and theories, played a fundamental and surprising role in the narrative of abstractionism.
About the Spiritual in Art
The creator of the first modern abstract paintings, Wassily Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He studied law and economics at Moscow University and was later hired as a professor of Roman law at the University of Dorpat, Estonia. At the age of 30, he began his studies in painting, focusing on drawings, sketches and anatomy, at the University of Munich. He was influenced by the compositions of Monet and Richard Wagner, as well as anthroposophy. Devotion to inner beauty and her own personal experiences remained a central theme in her art pieces. At this time Kandinsky wrote his famous theoretical work “On the Spiritual in Art”, a classic text from the beginning of modernism, extremely precise on the considerations of the practical material of his artistic production, and especially on color, attributing particular emotional and "spiritual" qualities to each shade and proposing complex shapes in which contrasting colors can be balanced with each other. In 1914, after the start of the First World War, Kandinsky returned to Moscow. However, he did not find much artistic inspiration, having returned to Munich, where he was a professor at the Bauhaus architecture school, until it was closed by the Nazis in 1933. As an art theorist he published several books on art theory and developed a complex and in-depth study of the ability of colors and shapes to represent sound and highlight human emotions.
“The color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul” – Wassily Kandisnsky
Music - and the idea of music - appears throughout Kandinsky's work, as is immediately apparent from the titles of his works: Compositions, Improvisations and Impressions. The Russian artist described in his books that color is not just a visual component but has a soul and can interact with each other and with the viewer. Kandinsky claimed to be able to "hear colors" and "see sounds." After the Bauhaus closed, Kandinsky moved to Paris, where he was largely isolated from other Impressionist and Cubist painters. He ended up obtaining French citizenship and lived the rest of his life in this country. Kandinsky's works and theories had a great impact and influence on later movements such as abstract expressionism.
Kandinsky's theory seen by new technologies
Now with the Play a Kandinsky platform, created by Google Arts & Culture in partnership with the French museum Center Pompidou, one can imagine Kandinsky's neurological condition, of associating colors with sounds. The painter had synesthesia, a condition that fused two or more senses of the human body. In his case, the mixture was visual-auditory: colors had sounds and, therefore, his paintings were like music. On this page you can also see the associations between colors and music that Kandinsky created.
