Rolando Sá Nogueira, (

Lisbon Lisbon ( ; ) is the capital and largest city of Portugal, with an estimated population of 567,131, as of 2023, within its administrative limits and 3,028,000 within the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, metropolis, as of 2025. Lisbon is mainlan ...

, May 19, 1921 – November 18, 2002), was one of the most important painters of his generation; according to José Augusto França, he belongs to the third wave of 20th Century modern Portuguese

painters Painting is a Visual arts, visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called "matrix" or "Support (art), support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with ...

Biography / Work

His early

portraits A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face is always predominant. In arts, a portrait may be represented as half body and even full body. If the subject in full body better re ...

– done whilst he was studying at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts –, closely related to

Matisse Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (; 31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French visual arts, visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a drawing, draughtsman, printmaking, printmaker, ...

and Modigliani; but he soon found his own voice, picturing the landscapes and the daily life of Lisbon's modern areas in personal, sensitive paintings, and distancing himself from the predominant currents in the Portuguese art world of the 1940s and 1950s. Between 1962 and 1964 he studied in

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands (county), West Midlands, within the wider West Midlands (region), West Midlands region, in England. It is the Lis ...

and at the

Slade School of Fine Art The UCL Slade School of Fine Art (informally The Slade) is the art school of University College London (UCL) and is based in London, England. It has been ranked as the UK's top art and design educational institution. The school is organised as ...

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

. This put him in touch with the early manifestations of Pop Art; and in London he was influenced by the 1963

Kurt Schwitters Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948) was a German artist. He was born in Hanover, Germany, but lived in exile from 1937. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dadaism, Constructivism (a ...

’ exhibition at the

Marlborough Marlborough or the Marlborough may refer to: Places Australia * Marlborough, Queensland * Principality of Marlborough, a short-lived micronation in 1993 * Marlborough Highway, Tasmania; Malborough was an historic name for the place at the sou ...

gallery. After returning to Portugal his work deeply changed; his pictorial space got closer to

cubism Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement which began in Paris. It revolutionized painting and the visual arts, and sparked artistic innovations in music, ballet, literature, and architecture. Cubist subjects are analyzed, broke ...

and he started using

collage Collage (, from the , "to glue" or "to stick together") is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assembly of different forms, thus creating a new whole. (Compare with pasti ...

and photo sensitized canvas. Without rupture or break, from the 1980s onwards his work evolved, and returned to more traditional pictorial values and to a type of narrative often closer to his 1950's work. Sá Nogueira exhibited extensively along the years, both in group and in one person exhibitions; in 1998 he held a large retrospective exhibition at the

Chiado Museum The National Museum of Contemporary Art of Chiado (Chiado Museum, in Portuguese: ''Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado'' – MNAC) is an art museum located in the Chiado neighbourhood of Lisbon, Portugal. It was created in 1911 and ...

, Lisbon. And he was a highly influential

drawing Drawing is a Visual arts, visual art that uses an instrument to mark paper or another two-dimensional surface, or a digital representation of such. Traditionally, the instruments used to make a drawing include pencils, crayons, and ink pens, some ...

teacher – from 1965 onwards he taught at Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes, Lisbon, at the Oporto School of Fine Arts, at the Lisbon Faculty of Architecture, etc. -, influencing a whole generation of younger Portuguese artists ( Pedro Calapez,

Manuel Botelho Manuel Botelho (born 1950, Lisbon) is a Portuguese artist. He lives and works in Estoril, Portugal, and teaches at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon. Botelho was born in Lisbon, Portugal. He studied architecture at the Lisbon School ...

, among many others).

References

Bibliography

*NOGUEiRA, Sá – Sá Nogueira: retrospectiva. Lisbon: Chiado Museum, 1998, {{DEFAULTSORT:Nogueira, Sa 2002 deaths 1921 births Singers from Lisbon Alumni of the Slade School of Fine Art 20th-century Portuguese painters 20th-century Portuguese male artists Portuguese male painters