Investigadora Responsável: Maria de Fátima Lambert - flambert@ese.ipp.pt
Research Network Group
Emília Ferreira – IHA – FSCH/Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
Cristina Susigan – Faculdade Santa Marcelina, em São Paulo, Brasil.
Maria João Vasconcelos – investigadora independente, Porto.
Project - Aesthetic Education and Audience Development for Contemporary Art Main scientific areas – Heritage and Culture; Arts, Photography and Literature; Archive and Collections; Artistic and Aesthetic Education.
Synopsis:
This exploratory research project focuses on a specific and, to date, unstudied phenomenon within Portuguese art and cultural history: the atelier-school directed by the painter Artur Loureiro at the Palácio de Cristal in Porto, active from his return to Portugal in 1901 until his death in 1932. Despite the historical visibility of this atelier in contemporary press sources and exhibition notices, no systematic study has yet examined its pedagogical structure, exhibition practices, or its role in shaping female artistic and visual practices in early twentieth-century Portugal. The project departs from the recognition that the atelier-school functioned as a hybrid space: simultaneously a workplace for the artist, a school of painting, and a semi-public exhibition venue. Attended predominantly by young women from bourgeois backgrounds, it offered artistic training that was socially encouraged yet rarely translated into professional artistic careers. The visual practices fostered within this context—drawing, painting, careful observation, and compositional discipline—appear, however, to have had lasting effects on the ways these women later engaged with photography, albums, and domestic visual culture. Building on an initial case study grounded in family photographic albums produced between 1936 and 1939, this project seeks to move beyond the individual archive to reconstruct a broader, collective visual and pedagogical culture. It aims to make visible a network of women-students whose artistic activity, exhibition history, and subsequent erasure from canonical narratives raise fundamental questions about gender, education, and visual literacy.
Main Objectives
1. To reconstruct the history, functioning, and spatial organization of Artur Loureiro’s atelier school at the Palácio de Cristal (1901–1932).
2. To identify and document the women who studied and exhibited work within this context, mapping exhibition cycles, names, and available works.
3. To analyse the artistic production of selected students (drawings, paintings) in relation to later photographic practices, particularly domestic photo albums.
4. To examine the gap between artistic training and professional exclusion, situating these trajectories within broader social and gendered frameworks.
5. To contribute original primary research that fills a significant gap in Portuguese feminist art history and visual culture studies.