Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso was born in Portugal and became one of his country’s first modern artists. He began his professional training in Lisbon, but after a year, moved to Paris, where he abandoned architecture for painting. In 1908 he attended the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the Viti Academy. Widely traveled, he also studied in Brussels and associated with major figures of his day, including Gertrude Stein, Amedeo Modigliani, Alexander Archipenko, Antoni Gaudí, and Constantin Brâncuși.
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De Souza-Cardoso was highly prolific and his paintings are characterized by intense colors and bold, semi-abstract shapes that presage Cubism and Futurism. He participated in the 1913 Armory Show in the U.S. and returned to Portugal in 1914 where his career as an early abstract painter flourished. Tragically, he died of the Spanish flu at the age of 30. A retrospective of his art in 1925 followed his death, after which point he faded into obscurity. Recent exhibitions have brought him new notice, including Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso at the Grand Palais National Galleries Paris in 2016; Amadeo de Souza Cardoso: Avant-Garde Dialogues at the Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa, Portugal in 2007; and Five Modern Painters from Portugal (1911-1960) at the Fundacio Caixa Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain, in 2004. Our painting was included in all three exhibitions and was reproduced in the accompanying catalogues.
Return from the Chase was included in the famous Armory Show of 1913 that, to this day, is the single most influential exhibition of modern art ever held in the United States. Pioneering abstract artist, Manierre Dawson—who would move to Ludington, Michigan in 1914—was greatly impressed by the Chicago version of the Armory Show and purchased the Souza-Cardoso to memorialize this turning point in his life and work. Dawson gave Return from the Chase to the Muskegon Museum of Art (along with his own Afternoon II) in 1968.