Architecture and Art of the Estado Novo

The architecture and art produced under the Estado Novo (1933-1974) constitute one of the densest and most contradictory chapters of twentieth-century Portuguese culture. Far from being reducible to a single style, they express the permanent tension between the modern impulse coming from the European avant-gardes and the political will to manufacture a national image, rooted in history and in propaganda. To understand this period is to understand how an authoritarian regime used stone, concrete and statuary to represent itself.

From modernity to “re-Portuguesation”

In the regime’s early years, public commissions coexisted with an architecture of modernist and Art Déco character, marked by pared-down volumes and firm geometry. Architects such as Cassiano Branco, Luís Cristino da Silva, Carlos Ramos, Jorge Segurado and Porfírio Pardal Monteiro essayed an international language applied to secondary schools, hospitals, churches and institutional buildings. This phase comes close to the modern movement that was then asserting itself in the country, although almost always subject to the monumentality that the State demanded of its works.

From the mid-1930s onwards, and under the cultural guidance of António Ferro at the head of the National Propaganda Secretariat, a deliberate “re-Portuguesation” of taste took hold. The aim was an aesthetic balance that would recover, in stylised form, the shapes of the national past — an inflection that would crystallise in the so-called Português Suave style.

The regime did not invent a style out of nothing: it clad the modern engineering of concrete with the decorative memory of an architecture idealised as “Portuguese”.

The Portuguese World Exhibition

The symbolic turning point was the Portuguese World Exhibition, inaugurated in Belém on 23 June 1940, in the context of the commemorations of the centenaries of the Foundation (1140) and the Restoration (1640). Directed by the architect José Ângelo Cottinelli Telmo, it occupied the Belém riverfront with ephemeral pavilions, statuary and large-scale scenography, visited by some three million people at the height of the Second World War.

Its lines — solid, utilitarian and unadorned, yet laden with historical rhetoric — became ubiquitous in the official architecture of the following decades. It was also here that the first version of the Padrão dos Descobrimentos (Monument to the Discoveries) was raised in perishable materials, later rebuilt in concrete and stone and inaugurated in 1960, with sculpture by Leopoldo de Almeida, on the fifth centenary of the death of Prince Henry the Navigator.

Português Suave and late modernism

Between the 1940s and 1950s, Português Suave became widespread in town halls, courthouses, the centenary schools, post-office branches and offices of the Caixa Geral de Depósitos. The hipped roofs, the dressed quoins, the ashlar portals and the solemn symmetry lent national dignity to programmes that, on the inside, were already frankly modern. This search for a constructed identity engages, in a distant way, with the sobriety of the traditional plain architecture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The hegemony of official taste was not untroubled. The First National Congress of Architecture, in 1948, gave voice to a generation that claimed the freedom of the international modern language, opening the way to a more experimental output in the regime’s final decades. That rupture continues in the contemporary Portuguese architecture of the post-25 April period. Alongside architecture, the Portuguese public sculpture of the period — commemorative, heroic and in the service of the memory of the Discoveries — completes a coherent visual programme, in which art and power were intertwined for more than forty years.