ABSTRACT
London emerged as a new destiny for artistic migration and a political and artistic context from where post-war Portugal and the continuity of the dictatorship could be freely assessed. In 1959, the curator of the Portuguese representation in the Fifth São Paulo Biennial pointed out the ‘constancy in the development of a modernity more and more consciously Portuguese in its Atlantic lyricism of universal sense’. The Portuguese artists were therefore particularly exposed to a specific artistic approach which was figurative and existential, formally experimental and visually provocative. In these artists’ work, a shared feeling of anxiety and uncertainty emerges from the intersection between individual awareness and a sense of belonging to a historical and cultural territory, between self-determination and collective destiny. Tradition and modernity, rurality and urban life, rusticity and glamour marked 1950s Lisbon. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
