ABSTRACT

In the artistic field, international disapproval of Portuguese colonialism became patent in the boycott by leading British artists who refused to participate in the ‘British Art of the Twentieth Century’ exhibition that the British Council and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation were jointly organising in Portugal in 1961. The increasing interest in exploring the legacy of colonialism in post-dictatorial Portugal was consolidated during the second half of the 1990s by authors such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Claudia Castelo, and Miguel Vale de Almeida, who relied on anthropology, literature, and cinema to support their theorical analysis. The journeys of the Portuguese artists in Europe and the work they produced in the creative context of London offer a complex picture of contemporaneity that engages with multiple temporalities. According to Fernando Pernes, Paula Rego and the pop artists produced critical images of contemporaneity and intervened directly in reality, although they addressed different concerns and contexts.