The Greyhounds

This month, thanks to Europeana every Tuesday and every Sunday we will be featuring spectacular artworks from cultural institutions across Europe. Each work, whether it’s an instantly recognisable masterpiece or a little known but unforgettable treasure, was shared by a European country as part of the Europeana 280 campaign. The campaign celebrates Europe’s shared art heritage by exploring the diverse and magnificent artworks that have contributed to it.

Amadeo de Souza Cardoso was a pioneer of abstraction and was the big name in Portuguese art in the early 20th century. His work blended Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism.

Greyhounds, painted in 1911, is an early work of Art Nouveau. Note the curved, undulating lines and the overlapping black and white. The pure colors and smooth, flat paints move away from the highly-modeled chiaroscuro. Even though these are benchmarks of Art Nouveau, you can see how Cardoso was also influenced by tradition; the running hares add a “barbaric” contrast to the simple stateliness of the rest of the piece. Sadly, Cardoso would never get to see the Art Nouveau and modernism at their full bloom. He died prematurely in 1918, at age 30, from the Spanish Flu.