Emilia «Mily» Possoz (1888-1967)

Lot 24
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Estimation :
3000 - 4000 EUR
Emilia «Mily» Possoz (1888-1967)
Street party for a wedding Watercolour and gouache on graphite line 57.5 x 47.5 cm. Signed lower left: Mily Possoz An artist very little known beyond the banks of the Tagus, Mily Possoz is an essential figure of the first generation of Portuguese modernist artists, and will remain as the only woman to have participated in the two exhibitions essential for the recognition of this current in Portugal: the Salon des Humoristes (Salão dos Humoristas Portuguêses) in 1913, and the Five Independents (Cinco Independentes) in 1923. Born in Lisbon into a Belgian family, studying first with Emilia dos Santos Braga, a female painter, then at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière in Paris, and finally in Dusseldorf, with Willy Spatz, she is the incarnation of this itinerant, European, educated, bourgeois beginning of the 20th century, where a transnational "spirit of the arts" is forged. Mily Possoz sometimes paints, draws and illustrates above all, and engraves a lot. She frequents the All-Lisbon intellectual, poet and avant-garde. She has participated in many important exhibitions with the National Society of Fine Arts of Portugal (Salão de Outono, Salão dos Independentes), as well as in public commissions, under the aegis of the Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional (including the decoration of two pavilions of the Exposição do Mundo Português, 1940). Friend of Sonia Delaunay (whom she met during her stay in Portugal, from 1915 to 1917), Marie Laurencin (with whom she regularly exhibited in Paris), Maria Elena Vieira da Silva (20 years her junior, but who studied, like her, under the magisterium of Emilia Santos Braga), Possoz deserves her place in the female aristocracy of modern art. It is in this capacity that the Fundacao Arpad Szenes - Vieira da Silva (Lisbon) dedicated a retrospective to her in 2010. Her works are characterized by compositions free of perspective, an assertive and delicate colourism, a rather gestural and synthetic
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