Modernism and Presença

Portuguese Modernism was not a single, unified movement but a sequence of generations and ruptures that, across three decades, formed above all around reviews. From Orpheu (1915) to Presença (1927) and the broadsheets of Neo-Realism, each of these publications defined an aesthetic, fought its polemics and consecrated — or rejected — its authors. To know the period is, in large part, to read the history of its magazines.

Before Orpheu: A Águia and saudosismo

At the start of the century, literary life was organised around the review A Águia, the organ of the Renascença Portuguesa movement (Oporto, from 1910). There flourished the saudosismo of Teixeira de Pascoaes, who saw in saudade the essence of the national soul. It was also in its pages that a young Fernando Pessoa made his début as a critic, announcing in 1912 the imminent coming of a “super-Camões”. The gesture was programmatic: the next generation would break with nostalgic lyricism and seek a radically new art.

Orpheu (1915): the founding scandal

The break came with Orpheu, a quarterly whose first issue appeared in March 1915. Edited by Luís de Montalvor and Ronald de Carvalho, it gathered Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, José de Almada Negreiros and others. Only two issues were published — a third, already typeset, did not then reach the newsstands for lack of funds — yet the impact was enormous: the press reacted with scandal and mockery, and the word orfismo became a byword for extravagance.

It was in Orpheu that Pessoa published the Triumphal Ode of Álvaro de Campos and the static drama O Marinheiro, and Sá-Carneiro some of his most restless verse. The latter’s suicide in Paris in 1916, at only 25, gave the group its tragic figure and the aura of a doomed generation.

The avant-gardes: Futurism and manifestos

The energy of Orpheu carried on into a series of -isms and manifestos. Pessoa tried out labels of his own — Paulism, Intersectionism, Sensationism — while Almada Negreiros took on the most combative face of Portuguese Futurism. His Anti-Dantas Manifesto (1915), a satirical pamphlet against the literary establishment, and his Futurist Ultimatum to the Portuguese Generations of the 20th Century became famous pieces of avant-garde provocation.

In 1917 the single issue of Portugal Futurista — which carried Álvaro de Campos’s Ultimatum — was seized by the police, closing the noisiest phase of the so-called first modernism.

Presença (1927–1940): the second modernism

A decade later, in Coimbra, came Presença — Folha de Arte e Crítica (a “sheet of art and criticism”, 1927–1940), the review that defines the second modernism. Edited by José Régio, João Gaspar Simões and Branquinho da Fonseca (later with Adolfo Casais Monteiro), Presença did not break with Orpheu: it prolonged and canonised it. To it belongs, in large measure, the critical recognition of Fernando Pessoa while he still lived.

Its programme, set out by Régio, opposed living art — sincere, original, the expression of a personality — to the dead art of academicism and imitation. It prized individualism, psychological introspection and the primacy of the creator over doctrine. Fifty-four issues appeared, and from it broke away, in disagreement, names such as Miguel Torga.

Review	Years	Place	Central figures
A Águia	1910–	Oporto	Teixeira de Pascoaes
Orpheu	1915	Lisbon	Pessoa, Sá-Carneiro, Almada
Presença	1927–1940	Coimbra	Régio, Gaspar Simões, Casais Monteiro
O Diabo / Vértice	1934– / 1945–	Lisbon / Coimbra	Redol, Namora, Carlos de Oliveira

Neo-Realism: the social turn

In the late 1930s a new generation reacted against what it took to be the psychologism and individualism of Presença. Drawing on historical materialism and social fiction, Neo-Realism shifted the focus from the self to society, making literature an instrument for exposing inequality — all under the watch of the Estado Novo censorship.

It asserted itself in reviews such as O Diabo, Sol Nascente and, later, Vértice, and above all in the novel. Gaibéus (1939), by Alves Redol, is generally taken as its founding novel.

There followed names such as Soeiro Pereira Gomes (Esteiros), Fernando Namora, Manuel da Fonseca and Carlos de Oliveira, and, in poetry, the Novo Cancioneiro series (1941–1944). Ferreira de Castro, with A Selva (1930), is regarded as a forerunner of the current.

Legacy

Out of these three decades came the canon of modern Portuguese poetry — with Pessoa at its centre — and a tradition of social prose that would mark later authors, from Vergílio Ferreira to José Saramago. The tensions between aesthetics and engagement, between the self and society, run through the whole of twentieth-century Portuguese literature and continue to define it.