The painter René Bertholo is one of the greatest figures of contemporary Portuguese painting. Born in 1935 in Alhandra, he studied from 1947 to 1951 at the António Arroio School of Decorative Arts and then at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts between 1951 and 1957. In 1953, at the invitation of Júlio Pomar, he took part in the VII General Exhibition of Plastic Arts and the following year he participated in the I Abstract Art Salon. After his training in Lisbon, in 1957 he left for Munich with...

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  Biography of René Bertholo

  The painter René Bertholo is one of the greatest figures of contemporary Portuguese painting. Born in 1935 in Alhandra, he studied from 1947 to 1951 at the António Arroio School of Decorative Arts and then at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts between 1951 and 1957. In 1953, at the invitation of Júlio Pomar, he took part in the VII General Exhibition of Plastic Arts and the following year he participated in the I Abstract Art Salon. After his training in Lisbon, in 1957 he left for Munich with Lourdes Castro, following in the footsteps of Paul Klee, whose works he admired. There he met Jan Voss, with whom he was very close for more than ten years.
  Together with other artists, he founded and directed the magazine "Ver" (1953-1955) and was one of the organisers of the Pórtico Gallery, along with Lourdes Castro.
  In 1958, René Bertholo moved to Paris where the group "KWY" was formed. From 1958 to 1964, he published a magazine with the group's title (12 issues). It is made up of the Portuguese artists René Bertholo, Lourdes Castro, António Costa Pinheiro, Gonçalo Duarte, José Escada and João Vieira, as well as Christo and Jan Voss. The twelve issues of "KWY" reflect the artistic and social upheavals of their time, as well as the interference of reality, everyday life and the visual imagery of the metropolises in the space of art.
  He published portfolios of his screenprints in 1960 and 1964. His painting, after a brief passage through abstraction, accumulates narrative figures, recognizable or not, with a strong poetic dimension, in fragmented or juxtaposed spaces. He is then close to Pop Art through his use of comic strip images, his desire to address the greatest number of people, but also to surrealism, whose spontaneous, automatic approach to the image he takes up.
  René Bertholo received a scholarship from the Gulbenkian Foundation in 1959-60. In 1961, he produced the first drawings and monotypes for the accumulation and dissemination of images. One of these monotypes will be part of the retrospective exhibition "Making Choices" in 2000, which the Museum of Modern Art in New York devoted to the period 1920-1960 with works from his collection.
  René Bértholo participated in several group exhibitions that marked the 1960s, such as "Mythologies Quotidiennes" in 1964 at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris. From 1966 onwards, the artist built the first mobile objects, "scale models".
  In 1972-73, René Bertholo left for Berlin at the invitation of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, to devote himself to studies in electronics applied to art.
  In 1981 he returned to his native Portugal and settled in the Algarve. He then left the international circus circuit, the Portuguese art market after the dictatorship having no network outside the country, and humbly ended his career while continuing to paint until his death.
  In 2000, the Serralves Museum devoted a retrospective to his work. René Bertholo died in 2005 in Lisbon.
  

  

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