Carlos Botelho

[3] In 1928, he started a comic page in the weekly publication Sempre Fixe, a collaboration that he maintained for over 22 years and which was the stage for a caustic criticism of a vast range of issues, going from trivial matters of daily life in Lisbon to some of the most relevant events in international life, in a "style that mixed up chronicle, autobiography, journalism, and satire",[4] making it an early example of autobiographical comics.

On 8 December 1950, the date when he ended that monumental cycle of work, his Ecos da Semana (Echoes of the Week) made a total of about 1,200 pages, "in a continuous discourse with no intervals or holidays".

From 1937 on, he was a member, along with Bernardo Marques and Fred Kradolfer, of the SPN (Secretariat for National Propaganda) team of decorators charged with producing the Portugal pavilions at the exhibition of Paris, New York and San Francisco: International Exhibition of Arts and Techniques, Paris, 1937; 1939 New York World's Fair; Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco, California, 1939.

In 1930, he set up in his studio in the Costa do Castelo, next to St George’s Castle, Lisbon, in the house that his wife, a primary education teacher, had a right to due to her position.

In 1939, he won 1st Prize at the International Contemporary Art Exposition, San Francisco, U.S., which allowed him to buy the land and later build his house-studio in Buzano, Parede (near to Lisbon).

[10] Alongside the urban landscapes, and "intending to free himself from the strict appreciation that had consecrated him as a humorist", Botelho turned his attention to the social realm in works that thematically and stylistically bring him close to the "expressionist painting of the Northern European tradition, enunciating a sense of research that could be connoted to Van Gogh’s Dutch period".

[12] From the 1930s onwards, Botelho’s Lisbon becomes an intensely personal realm, capable of revealing something profound, granting us "the view of an archetypical city whose beauty is the mediating form of the truth of a people or of its specific anthropology […].

With a great simplicity of processes and effects, [Botelho] created a plastic universe as the symbolic and imaginative mirror of one of the most significant facets of the Portuguese spirit".

The formal principles he investigates in these works will reappear shortly after under a different guise in the formal structuring of the urban landscapes that occupy him until the end: "The last productive clash came with the affirmation of abstractionism in the 1950s, via the Paris school and Vieira da Silva, and this was decisive for the cycles of his long final production: he did not cut off the metaphorical body of Lisbon [...] but disciplined it in rhymes and chromatic spatialities in which light is the determining referent.