José de Almeida Araújo (1924 - 2024) took on different artistic profiles over the years: he was an actor (he played opposite Virgílio Ferreira in Armando Miranda's classic “Ave de Arribação” and appeared in Henri Decoin's “Au grand balcon”, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1949), an architect (he designed, for example, the Vilalara Thalassa hotel in the Algarve), a sculptor, a painter and a photographer. He edited and wrote books, such as “London, Remains of the '50s” and his memoir “Life in Pieces”. He used to say that “the arts are all cousins to each other”. In all of them, he showed unmistakable talent.

In the last few months of his life, Almeida Araújo was involved in preparing the exhibition that will be on show at the Cascais Cultural Center until June 23, 2024. The exhibition “Almeida Araújo: Photography and Painting” focuses on his pictorial and photographic work. The first part, dedicated to painting, features 18 canvases produced between 1960 and 1994, including portraits of family and friends and representations of Portuguese, French and Brazilian landscapes. Of particular note is the canvas “Nureyev”, a portrait of Rudolf Khametovich Nureyev, one of the most celebrated ballet dancers of the 20th century.

As for the photographs, they are records of everyday life in London in the 1950s England where he lived, before Beatlemania and the cultural effervescence that would bring the Swinging Sixties. The images, which were previously published in the book “London, Remains of the '50s”, published in 2013, record urban scenes (such as the one in which the classic figure of the bobby directs traffic) at different times of the day and seasons of the year, revealing a complicity between the photographer and the city around him. They are portraits of anonymous people in the hustle and bustle of the streets, as well as parks and buildings in the English capital.

He also photographed political and artistic figures such as John F. Kennedy, Jeanne Moreau, Jean Cocteau and Roger Vadim. The son of a Portuguese man and a Jewish German woman, José Harry de Almeida Araújo was a cosmopolitan creator who lived through a century of rapid change. He grew up with his maternal family in Berlin, having escaped Nazi persecution. His adolescence and early youth were spent in Cascais. In the post-war period, dissatisfied with the Portuguese scene at the time, he emigrated, first to Paris and then to London. He befriended stars such as Jean Simmons, Danielle Dellorme, Sacha Guitry and John Wayne, and spent time with Le Corbusier - who, like him, worked on the fringes of the Academy - as well as Picasso, Henri Salvador, André Malraux and Errol Flynn.

He was the artist chosen to paint the top of the largest gallery in the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, which also houses Leonardo da Vinci's “The Last Supper”. There he painted “Adoration of the Cross”, a large oil painting on wood measuring 3.90 x 5m. He also painted portraits of Winston Churchill and Princess Soraya of Iran. After an adventurous and exciting life, José de Almeida Araújo settled back in Cascais, where he ended his days.

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