Guilherme Santa-Rita, or Santa-Rita Pintor, as he preferred to be called, was born in 1889, in Lisbon.
In 1921, he won a scholarship and travelled to Paris to study at the Académie des Beaux-Artsand. After visiting an Italian futuristic exhibition, he started to get interested in Futurism - a modernist movement celebrating the technological and futurist era. It was inspired by the development of Cubism using the wide range of angles within a given time-frame all aimed to incorporate the dimension of time within the Picture.
Then, at the age of twenty-three, Santa-Rita joined the Futuristic Movement.
Two years later, he returned to Portugal. Then he participated with other Portuguese modernists, as Amadeo de Souza Cardoso and Almada Negreiros, in a modernist magazine called “Presença”, where he published some of his paintings, which he never exhibited in Portugal. Later, he would create his own magazine called “Portugal Futurista”.
By that time, Santa-Rita, as well as the other modernists, was misunderstood by the Portuguese conservative society, due to his sense of innovation and creativity, since he had brought a new artistic conception from Paris. Modernists were criticized and accused of degenerating Portuguese traditional Art.
His conception of Art was about the need to understand a painting: people should look at it and think about it, try to understand what they were seeing, make a personal interpretation. It was the rise of an intellectual art.
Santa-Rita was considered one of the most important artists in the development of Futurism in Portugal. He had a natural need to be original. His paintings exalted the movement and were dynamic and he had an extraordinary ability to create figures and shapes. He did not only represent the objects in the paintings, he tried to pass on an emotional and philosophic interpretation of something. He used to choose long sentences for the titles of his paintings’, suggesting a sensible and personal way of interpreting his art.
He was a mysterious person, that due to his premature death at the age of twenty-nine, did not have the opportunity of experimenting with new art movements. He fought against the Portuguese inferiority complex and mediocrity. He was a symbol of a new generation of artists who tried to experiment the new ways of representing Art, proclaiming their discontentment with society.
Unfortunately, very little is known about his work, because he asked his family to burn all his work after he passed away. Only Cabeça (a cubist head portrait) and seven more other paintings still remain to show us the work of this talented artist.