Amadeo de Souza Cardoso

Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso went from a quiet Portuguese wine-country family to the middle of the Paris avant-garde. In Montparnasse before the First World War he shared a friendship and for a time a building with Amedeo Modigliani, who drew his portrait, and he absorbed Cubism and Futurism at speed.

His painting fractured into bright, restless shapes, part machine, part folk pattern, among the boldest modern work any Portuguese artist had made. He even showed at the 1913 Armory Show that introduced modern art to New York.

The war sent him home to Portugal, where he kept painting fast and hard. In 1918 the influenza pandemic killed him at 30. Most of his surviving work is now gathered at the Gulbenkian museum in Lisbon.