Pessoa. All art is a form of literature

 

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From February 7 to May 7, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía will be offering an exhibition about Pessoa as embassador to show the spectator the scene of fhe main Portuguese trends since the beginning of the XX century to 1935.

Fernando Pessoa, the More-than-a-hundred-names Poet

Portuguese poet and writer, in his work, different voices or heteronyms dialogue, complete poetic personalities. Pessoa writes: “With such a lack of people with whom to coexist, as there is today, what can a man with sensitivity do, but to invent his friends, or at least, his spirit friends?”. His main heteronyms are Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, and his semiheteronym, Bernardo Soares. Through the heteronyms, the poet expresses with other voices, he looks at the world in a multiple way, canalizing in his work the need to inwardly communicate with the different personalities that live in him. His heteronyms become identities, not fictional, but real for having artistic manifestations regardless of Pessoa’s.

“All art is a form of literature”, Alvaro de Campos

 

The artistic reference of what was happening with art at the beginning of the last century was Paris and the main isms of the time. In Portugal they looked for some originality, they looked for a creative way and they raised their own isms.

Pessoa’s exhibition, All Art Is a Form of Literature, shows the poet’s world, his heteronyms, his poetry, and the magazines for which he wrote, such as Orpheu and Athena. In them, the poet spread his ideas through stories and poems that gave birth to his isms.

Pessoa had great influence in Portugal’s artistic world. The group around him adopted his isms: Paulism, Intersectionism, and Sensacionism , that were born from the poet’s ideas regarding the crisis of the modern man.

Pessoa declares the beginning of the supremacy of the feeling, since, according to the poet, the base of all art is the “intellectualized feeling”. Sensacionism consists of a way of looking at reality focusing on the feelings it produces; a genuinely intellectual way of approaching the world that discards everything that doesn’t produce any feeling.

Most of the exhibition, organized by Ana Ara and Joao Fernandes, is composed by the works of José de Almada Negreiros, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, Eduardo Viana, and Sarah Affonso. There are also other works by the Delaunays that belong to the period they spent in Portugal.

I missed reading his poems written in the exhibition’s walls in Portuguese other than in Spanish.