Montage and Social Critique in the Work of Portuguese Artists in London

In the 1960s and 1970s, many Portuguese artists succeeded in escaping the repressive and stultifying conditions they experienced in Portugal under a dictatorial regime that kept its people backward and isolated in Europe. Some artists roamed to London, where they enrolled in prestigious art schools and were exposed to new artistic movements. The British capital had become the epicentre of social change and artistic avant-garde, a phenomenon that had started after the Second World War with the emergence of British pop art in the late 1940s and the youth-driven cultural revolution of the Swinging Sixties. In this paper I discuss visual work produced by several Portuguese artists who lived, studied and developed their art practice in London during these decades. I focus on Eduardo Batarda and Ana Hatherly, and examine the ways in which they engaged with processes of montage. Central to British pop art and related media such as comics and film animation, these formal processes were deployed as strategies of juxtaposition and condensation that allowed Portuguese artists to explore a sense of freedom and produce a social critique in playful and humoristic ways, in contrast to the conservatism and gloominess of dictatorial Portugal.