Os Galgos

Amadeo de Souza Cardoso was a young Portuguese painter living in Paris in 1911, on friendly terms with Modigliani and the sculptor Brancusi, right as Cubism was breaking. That year he threw himself into a run of hunting scenes, and this is one, two greyhounds, one white and one black, standing in sharp profile against distant mountains and a rising sun, while two rabbits leap away below them. Everything is flattened and stylised, the colours smooth and strong, closer to decoration than to any real chase. He showed work at the Salon des Independants in Paris that same spring. Cardoso would be dead seven years later, at 30, one of the millions killed by the influenza pandemic of 1918, his name still barely known outside Portugal.