Hotel Ritz, 1958 en

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The Hotel Ritz was the realisation of a long-desired luxury hotel project for the city of Lisbon. In 1953, dictator António de Oliveira Salazar asked banker Ricardo Espírito Santo and businessman José Manuel Queiroz Pereira to invest in a leading hotel. A company was formed to make the investment a reality, SODIM (Sociedade de Investimentos Imobiliários), and the place for the hotel was chosen, next to Parque Eduardo VII, which was acquired in 1953 from the Lisbon City Council. In 1952, Porfírio Pardal Monteiro began work on a project that would have two more versions and for which he carried out studies while travelling around the Côte d'Azur and Madrid, together with architect Jorge Ferreira Chaves, with whom he worked on the hotel's design. 
The hotel was officially inaugurated on 24 November 1959, seven years after the project began and two years after Pardal Monteiro's death in 1957. His nephew António Pardal Monteiro led the rest of the work after that date.

“The themes developed, both in the tapestries and in the incised drawing, are characteristic of Almada: desire, the love triangle, voyeurism and rejection”

The Hotel Ritz is yet another example of the fruitful collaboration between architect Porfírio Pardal Monteiro and Almada Negreiros. As a private enterprise, despite Salazar's closeness to the investors, the interior decoration did not have thematic instructions, as was usually the case with public works. The Ritz was also the building that brought together the most artists in its interior decoration, with murals, canvases, sculptures and tapestries. However, Almada is the artist who stands out the most, with two types of contributions: three large-scale tapestries for the lounge, executed at the Portalegre Factory, which tell a short sequential story of centaurs dating; and a luxurious incised gold design on black marble on a wall in the restaurant's access hall, depicting a country scene. 

The themes developed, both in the tapestries and in the incised drawing, are characteristic of Almada: desire, the love triangle, voyeurism and rejection, themes he often worked on through figures that don't appear here: Pierrot, Pierrette and Harlequin. In both of the Ritz stories, a male character lurks around a female character. In the tapestry, a centaur is glimpsed in purplish shadow behind a tree. Apparently, the female character rejects the curly-haired centaur and consummates her love with another centaur in the next tapestry (presumably the one behind the tree), in a relatively audacious representation that might not shock too much because they are mythological figures. The third tapestry, at night, shows the rejected centaur prostrate. Constellations of coloured circles serve as a backdrop to the actions of the geometric figures.

In the incised drawing, you can see the perfect combination with the architecture of the space through the use of the column and the curved wall. The column is used to depict a peasant behind a tree, peering down at the woman carrying the pitcher, passing over the ‘stones’ of what is presumed to be a watercourse, and the peasant woman sprawled out sleeping in the haystacks. Another male figure on the right is also looking at them, twisting from the top of his horse and travelling in the opposite direction to the women. The figure carrying the pitcher is depicted taking advantage of the slight concavity of the wall in that area. The scene is drawn with thick golden strokes, which define shadow and light and simulate the three-dimensionality of the figures on the curved and flat surfaces.

Mariana Pinto dos Santos