Helena Almeida (1934- 2018)

Helena Almeida was a Portuguese artist and photographer, born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1934. She was the daughter of the celebrated sculptor Leopoldo de Almeida and enjoyed working in his studio from a young age. Almeida studied art at the university of Lisbon, graduating in 1955, During her career, her work spanned multiple disciplines, frequently combining them into mixed media pieces involving performance, photography, mark making, etcetera (European Parliament, n.d.)

Her work often included her own body, which she utilised to conduct explorations into the internality and externality of the human condition. In viewing her work I am reminded of the work of Elina Brotherus, who similarly uses her body in work that encompasses performance and photography.

Almeida created a series of images in 1977, called  A Study for Inner Improvement, in which she uses blue paint and a transparent screen to mask out elements of herself in her self-portraits portraits. The Blue paint used by Almeida shows a striking likeness to the hue enjoyed by Yves Klein throughout the 1960s. Similarly, both Klein’s Anthropometries and Almeida’s A Study for Inner Improvement highlight the female body, and both share an element of the performative in their construction, but there, however, the similarities end. Almeida’s work incorporates the feminine as the original creator, a position of importance and power compared with Klein’s derogatory use as an artist’s tool. Klein observed the feminine through a male gaze, whereas Almeida utilises her form to encapsulate feminist protest.  

Study for Inner Improvement (Almeida, 1977)

Writer and Academic Maria Lufsa Coelho believes Almeida to have been aware of Klein’s Anthropometries, she was in Paris in the 1960s when Klein commenced working on it, but she acknowledges Almeida’s dissociation of herself from Klein and her discomfort at “Klein's way of squeezing women onto the canvas” (Isabel Carlos, cited in Coelho, 2017). Coelho continues to clarify her opinion, stating when referring to Klein’s work:

“These female bodies reiterate rather than challenge their allocated place and role in the art tradition. In contrast, in Almeida's artwork, … the female body is also the artist's body, which is given the power to translate the creative act by its very existence and actions; as a result, it possesses an expressive, transformative and active force that is absent from the female bodies depicted by Klein” (Coelho, 2017).

Study for Inner Improvement (Almeida, 1977)

Aleida’s use of the Yves Klein Blue(ish) hue is an essential element in the reading of this work. I suspect that it would have far less impact if the paint used had been pink (an extreme example or any other colour for that matter. Blue is a culturally gendered colour in most Western cultures, and with the Yves Klein variant, its patriarchal overtones are ratcheted up to almost breaking point. I share Maria Lufsa Coelho’s opinion that Aleida’s use of colour is more than coincidental. If one is going to protest against an art form that degrades the feminine, then what better way to do it than in an equally feminine, but no less obvious way?

EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT, n.d. Helena Almeida (1934 - 2018) [viewed 16/11/2024]. Available from: https://art-collection.europarl.europa.eu/en/artists/helena-almeida/

COELHO, M. L., 2017. Woman-Body-Paint: Helena Almeida and the Visual Inscription of Sexual Difference. Luso-Brazilian Review, 54(1), 55–77. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26450395

ALMEIDA, H., 1977, Study for Inner Improvement. In WRIGLEY, T., 2013. A study of Helena Almeida’s series of photographs, entitled Study for Inner Improvement - a riposte to the stultifying, male-dominated art world of the seventies... [viewed 16/11/2024]. Available from: https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/2924/helena-almeida-study-for-inner-improvement