Júlio Pomar was born on January 10, 1926, in Lisbon. He attended the António Arroio School of Decorative Arts and the schools of Fine Arts in Lisbon and Porto. His first solo exhibition took place in Porto in 1947, where he presented only drawings. During those years, his opposition to Salazar’s regime resulted in a four-month imprisonment, the seizure of one of his paintings by the political police, and the suppression of the frescoes – covering more than 100 m²– that he had created for the Batalha Cinema in Porto.

He settled in Paris in 1963 and received a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation from 1964 to 1966. He worked and lived between Paris and Lisbon until his death in May 2018, in the Portuguese capital.

From a body of work that spanned eight decades, his participation in the 2nd São Paulo Biennial (1953) stands out, as do the exhibitions Tauromachies and Les Courses (Galerie Lacloche, Paris, 1964 and 1965), and his participation in an exhibition devoted to Ingres’s painting Le Bain Turc at the Louvre Museum (1971). Also noteworthy are the exhibitions L’Espace d’Eros (Galerie de la Différence, Brussels, 1978), Théâtre du Corps (Galerie de Bellechasse, Paris, 1979), Tigres (Galerie de Bellechasse and Galeria 111, 1981 and 1982), Um ano de desenho – quatro poetas no Metropolitano de Lisboa (CAM – Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1984, an institution that had already promoted his first retrospective exhibition in 1978), Pomar – Autobiografia (Sintra Museum of Modern Art, 2003), Júlio Pomar: Cadeia da Relação (Serralves Museum, 2008), and Júlio Pomar. Atirar a Albarda ao Ar (Galeria 111 and Árvore – Cooperative of Artistic Activities, 2012).

Throughout his long life, he never ceased to create – drawings, paintings, prints, ceramics, sculptures, assemblages – inscribing into the History of Art works as important as The Bricklayer’s Lunch (1946-50), Man With a Scythe (1947), Fishwife Eating Watermelon (1949), March (1946), Abriliberdade (1974), or Slave Ship (2005–2012). Júlio Pomar’s public artworks include the emblematic ceramic panels on Avenida Infante Santo and Campo Grande, the Alto dos Moinhos metro station in Lisbon, and other artistic interventions carried out in various cities.

In 1990, the French Ministry of Culture invited Júlio Pomar to produce a portrait of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The following year, Pomar painted the official portrait of President Mário Soares, now housed in the Museum of the Presidency of the Republic at the Belém Palace, Lisbon – an emblematic, irreverent, and seminal work for the way it deconstructed the protocol of official representations.

JÚLIO POMAR
1926 – 2026

In 2026, the Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar celebrates the centenary of the birth of Júlio Pomar, an artist whose constantly evolving body of work spanned decades, and whose life and legacy established him as one of the most significant figures in Portuguese art of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The celebration of a centenary – particularly in the case of a figure such as Júlio Pomar – is a milestone of profound cultural, social, and historical importance. Today more than ever, celebrating art and artists means acting against the destruction of memory, history, society, beauty, and life itself. On the occasion of Júlio Pomar’s centenary, a symbol of intellectual longevity, what is celebrated is not only the passage of time, but also a cultural heritage that outlives the individual and encourages future generations to reactivate his legacy of freedom and resistance.

These commemorations provide an opportunity for institutions such as the Atelier-Museu to organise programmes focused on the preservation and revalorisation of his legacy, critical reflection, and the updating of that heritage, while also encouraging research. In this context, the Atelier-Museu’s 2026 programme will allow new generations to encounter fundamental works from his artistic legacy. It will make it possible to “rethink” the artist within his historical context, assessing how his work influenced modernity and how it continues to engage in dialogue with the present, while catalysing the publication of new studies, the presentation of anthological exhibitions, and complementary multidisciplinary programmes.

In 2026, revisiting texts written in the context of his death and artistic legacy, the exceptional nature of Júlio Pomar’s work is once again recalled through a quotation by Michel Waldberg, which conveys the plurality of meanings his practice opens up:

“I know of no work more paradoxical, more contradictory in appearance, than that of Júlio Pomar. […] I saw him incessantly change style (if this word still has any meaning), renew themes and techniques, disappoint expectations […], refuse any barrier, any closure, go further, cast off moorings, risk everything, make conceptual U-turns, start again from scratch, put life at stake in painting and painting at stake in life, and confront ceaselessly, as it were with bare hands, the ‘restless whiteness’ of canvas or paper.”

This statement expresses the power carried by Pomar’s work, which in some cases decisively influenced the course of Portuguese art and that of his contemporaries and successors. For this reason, from the moment the museum team began working with the painter, it became more challenging to identify what unites this body of work across seven decades than to trace the variations it inevitably assumed in order to renew itself.

What runs throughout Pomar’s work is a marked pursuit of movement. As stated on another occasion, the artist “moves as he paints and moves spirits to write. Pomar seeks movement, and this movement – seemingly escaping his control and gaining autonomy – advances from the canvas towards the viewer’s space. Colour gains density and impact, advancing and receding in flat or composite tones. The lines of drawing come alive, as if moving on and within the paper itself.”

Sometimes speaking through painting, at other times through words, Pomar never lost the desire or the need to turn the world upside down and to question all conventions. Restlessness lay at the root of the continuous transformation of his work, leading him to shift aesthetically without fearing acceptance or rejection – paradoxically making him a rare and exceptional artist.

To grasp the twists and turns that make up an artist’s career is also to understand the history of art and to recognise that it is shaped by what escapes the norm, by what is controversial or non-consensual. In this regard, Pomar’s trajectory is indispensable: from Neo-Realism – as a figure of opposition and critique of the regime – to broader critical engagements that, in different phases, he extended to disciplinary notions themselves, forging collaborations that seemed irreconcilable, uniting antagonistic poles, and bringing together high culture and popular culture.

It was this breadth that the team encountered when the Atelier-Museu opened its doors to the public on 5 April 2013, with a collection of around 400 works loaned by the Júlio Pomar Foundation, which consistently responded, without reservation, to the museum’s requests.

It was therefore necessary to understand how Pomar’s work – and the concepts and problems inherent to it – remain operative in the present, particularly in the work of his peers. This was not about looking backward, but about transforming the museum into a space of experimentation and atelier practice, demonstrating that revisiting an artist’s work – understanding it from the inside and out, in both its foundations and concrete production – resides in a movement of back and forth, research and inquiry, creating a bridge between past and present, always with the aim of understanding what the work has sown and opened up in subsequent times.

This principle also guides the 2026 programme celebrating Júlio Pomar’s centenary at the Atelier-Museu. This challenge – where revisiting the work has a prospective rather than retrospective or melancholic meaning – was only possible through the painter’s close involvement, as he followed the team’s work attentively and granted them “carte blanche.” Pomar entrusted himself to the process as if surrendering to the movement of a dance, in which he was both protagonist and spectator.

Thus, step by step, the Atelier-Museu was built – not as a building, but as a programme, a place, and a spirit of mutual support, challenge, and openness, shaped in reference to the work and figure of Júlio Pomar, and welcoming different generations from diverse disciplinary fields, exercising and putting critical thinking into practice. In 2013, with the Atelier-Museu fully operational, the artist was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Lisbon.

In 2014, as recognition of the cooperation between Lisbon City Council and the Atelier-Museu–EGEAC, Júlio Pomar made a new addendum to his donation, adding a considerable number of artworks to the collection on loan at the museum, thereby expanding its scope. In 2023, when celebrating ten years since the museum’s establishment within the Portuguese artistic landscape, the Júlio Pomar Foundation opted to cease its activity, transferring ownership of the loaned artworks to the municipality for the continued development and consolidation of the museum’s work.

With thirteen years of activity since opening – including the celebration of the 50th anniversaries of May ’68 and 25 April 1974 – the Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar has collaborated with numerous institutions, artists, and professionals from different generations and fields, ranging from architecture and visual arts to art criticism and other areas of reflection, alongside a steadily growing audience.

From the outset, Júlio Pomar closely followed and actively collaborated with the Atelier-Museu. To date, several exhibitions devoted to his work have been presented, alongside programmes that broaden interpretative frameworks and reveal new connections between his practice and contemporaneity. These include exhibitions with artists such as Rui Chafes, Julião Sarmento, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Luísa Cunha, Sara Bichão, Rita Ferreira, Hugo Canoilas, Salomé Lamas, Suzanne Themlitz, Jorge Queiroz, André Romão, Osso Coletivo, Inland Journal, Graça Morais, Daniel Moreira, and Rita Castro Neves, as well as exhibitions curated by Delfim Sardo, Paulo Pires do Vale, Catarina Rosendo, Maria do Mar Fazenda, Hugo Dinis, Alexandre Melo, Mariana Pinto dos Santos, Afonso Dias Ramos, Alexandre Pomar, Óscar Faria, and Ana Rito, among others.

In 2026, the centenary exhibition will approach Pomar’s work from the broad perspective of collage. Titled “Glue Does Not Make the Collage”, this anthological exhibition proposes that his artistic production is deeply permeated by processes of agglutination, juxtaposition, and layering – of planes, elements, symbols, figures, colours, and lines – even when such combinations may initially appear nonsensical. Curated by Sara Antónia Matos, Pedro Faro, and Constança Pupo Cardoso, the exhibition brings together works from across his career, focusing not on collage as a technical practice involving adhesive, but on a free play of associations through which the artist persistently pursued an exercise in freedom and creation.

In the final quarter of 2026, highlighting the audacity embodied in Pomar’s work and its capacity to inspire, an exhibition will bring Júlio Pomar into dialogue with one of today’s most irreverent and challenging artists, Gabriel Abrantes. Under the title “Painting – Painting”, the exhibition will explore painting – whether through traditional media or artificial intelligence – the medium in which Pomar excelled.

Throughout the year, as part of the conference cycles organised by the Atelier-Museu, a series of talks on Art and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will take place, conceived by Shifter and presented by João Ribeiro. In the first half of the year, the third cycle of conferences organised by the Atelier-Museu and BAC on Archives will be held, this edition approached from the artists’ perspective and conceived by Liliana Coutinho.

To provide the public with analytical tools, the Júlio Pomar Atelier-Museu continues to invest strongly in its editorial project, having published more than thirty titles to date, including exhibition catalogues and interviews – most notably an in-depth interview conducted with the painter over two years. In 2026, two new interviews with leading figures in the field will be published, offering new and potentially unexpected perspectives on the arts.

Also noteworthy within the editorial project are three volumes of critical texts written by the artist between 1942 and 2013, which for the first time provided access to the “Written Part” of his work: Notas Sobre uma Arte Útil; Da Cegueira dos Pintores; and Temas e Variações (2014). In 2026, “Written Part IV” will be published, comprising Pomar’s reports as a fellow of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, thus completing and making publicly available the full compendium of his written work.

2026 will also mark the publication and launch of the third volume of the Catalogue Raisonné of paintings, continuing the previous two volumes and completing more than a decade of research. Without singling out any one initiative – since all actions are interrelated and mutually reinforcing – the Catalogue Raisonné represents one of the museum’s most substantial foundational projects, reflecting its investment in research, systematisation, and dissemination of the painter’s work, and constituting a key element of the centenary celebrations.

In addition to exhibitions held at its premises, the Atelier-Museu – which began its travelling exhibitions just two years after opening – opened 2026 with a partnership with the Museu da Marioneta (Puppet Museum, also part of EGEAC), presenting Júlio Pomar’s Robertos drawings to the public for the first time.

The Atelier-Museu has also developed partnerships with several municipalities, bringing the artist’s work to other regions of the country. In 2026, it will embark on an international dissemination project in partnership with Instituto Camões, presenting exhibitions of Pomar’s work in Portuguese embassies and cultural venues.

Believing that the dissemination of art must extend beyond physical barriers and borders, in 2026 the Atelier-Museu, in partnership with Wikipedia and Google Arts, will also promote Júlio Pomar’s work and legacy online, amplifying its reach and resonance.

In addition to exhibitions and dissemination initiatives, and in accordance with Pomar’s wishes, the Atelier-Museu established a Contemporary Art Curatorship Prize in his name in 2015, opening itself to proposals from new generations of professionals. It also created a residency grant in New York, which in several cases provided artists with their first experience of internationalisation. In 2016, to mark the centenary, the Atelier-Museu will award a Painting Prize, supported by Tereza Martha, Pomar’s widow, to an artist who works with or rethinks painting within the context of contemporary art.

Júlio Pomar died at the age of 92, after more than seventy years of artistic practice. He worked daily in his studio, making art present in everyday life – a commitment evident in several public artworks, notably the Alto dos Moinhos Metro Station in Lisbon, and in Portuguese citizens’ passports, where Fernando Pessoa is portrayed by Pomar’s hand.

He did not live to see the censored paintings of the Batalha Cinema in Porto unveiled, but they remain – now and into the future – as a reminder that, in many circumstances, the struggle for freedom and democracy can withstand even the most brutal forms of oppression.

Júlio Pomar is the only Portuguese painter who, during his lifetime, saw one of his works – The Bricklayer’s Lunch – undergoing classification by the Portuguese State (2015) as an item of public interest. It may therefore be said that he not only belongs to the history of Portuguese art but actively helped to shape it.

All of this is what the centenary of Júlio Pomar seeks to rekindle in 2026: stimulating the dissemination, understanding, and renewal of his legacy, and fostering new studies and research around his work.

The Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar extends its greetings to all entities and institutions that, in Júlio Pomar’s name and in recognition of the versatility and importance of his work, have organised commemorative initiatives, whether in partnership with the museum or independently.

Sara Antónia Matos
(Director Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar)