Academic literature on the topic 'Arts, african – 20th century – exhibitions'

La casa e la mostra d’architettura sono i due oggetti di ricerca che s’incrociano in The Housing Project. Discourses Ideals, Models and Politics in 20th century exhibitions, co-curato da Gaia Caramellino e Stephanie Dadour nel 2020 per i tipi di Leuven Press. Il volume s’ispira alle discussioni del convegno On the Role of 20th Century Exhibitions in Shaping Housing Discourses (2016, ENSA Paris Malaquais e Politecnico di Milano). I dieci saggi di altrettanti autori europei e americani esplorano il ruolo delle mostre come medium in una fase cruciale di elaborazione e circolazione internazionale delle tante declinazioni della casa moderna, tra gli anni 1920 e 1970. Sono organizzati in due parti, che approfondiscono rispettivamente il ruolo delle mostre come spazi di traduzione e di mediazione. Caramellino e Dadour prendono le distanze da un approccio monografico e collocano le tante e diverse esperienze espositive in una cornice più ampia, sul piano disciplinare e geografico.

Since their appearance in the early 20th century, catalogues prepared for exhibitions of African art have undergone a gradual transformation. Beginning as mere checklists many of these publications have, in the 1970s and 80s, evolved into major scholarly works whose significance transcends their original purpose as guides to the exhibitions. Changes occurring over the years are traced through examination of the form and content of representative catalogues and by review of the reception by art historians of many of these works into the corpus of literature of African art. The growing importance of exhibition catalogues as important art historical documents is also demonstrated by a chronological analysis of bibliographic citations in the major scholarly journal of African art in the United States. Finally, scrutiny of sources and annotations included in an important bibliographic guide to the literature of African art indicates how firmly established the exhibition catalogue has become as one of the most important publication forms for the dissemination of scholarly writing on African art.[This paper won the ARLIS/NA Gerd Muehsam Award for 1986. We hope to publish a sequel in a future issue, on exhibitions of African art in Africa and the development of catalogues written by Africans. Editor].

During the interwar decades, African American artists grew in number and visibility, and a wide range of publications featured stories on so-called Negro art. Notices on Negro art exhibitions and educational initiatives appeared in the black press and the mainstream mass media, as well as in special interest publications ranging from Art News to the Club Candle (the newsletter of the New Rochelle Women's Club). Though small in number, collectively these events served as opportunities to measure the overall progress or pulse of the African American artist.

This article aims to show the transformation in the way African art is displayed in museums which has taken place over the last few decades. Over the last 70 years, from the second half of the twentieth century, the field of African Art studies, as well as the forms taken by art exhibitions, have changed considerably. Since W. Rubin’s controversial exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art at MoMA (1984), art originating from Africa has begun to be more widely presented in museums with a strictly artistic profile, in contrast to the previous exhibitions which were mostly located in ethnographical museums. This could be the result of the changes that have occurred in the perception of the role of museums in the vein of new museology and the concept of a “curatorial turn” within museology. But on the other hand, it seems that the recognition of the artistic values of old and contemporary art from the African continent allows art dealers to make large profits from selling such works. This article also considers the evolution of the idea of African art as a commodity and the modern form of presentations of African art objects. The current breakthrough exhibition at the Bode Museum in Berlin is thoroughly analysed. This exhibition, entitled Beyond compare, presents unexpected juxtapositions of old works of European art and African objects of worship. Thus, the major purpose of this article is to present various benefits of shifting meaning from “African artefacts” to “African objects of art,” and therefore to relocate them from ethnographic museums to art museums and galleries

This dissertation examines the history of the Durban Art Gallery from its founding in 1892 until 2004, a decade after the First Democratic Election. While the emphasis is on significant changes that were introduced in the post-1994 period, the earlier section of the study locates these initiatives within a broad historical framework. The collecting policies of the museum as well as its exhibitions and programmes are considered in the light of the institution 's changing social and political context as well as shifting imperatives within a local, regional and national art world. The Durban Art Gallery was established in order to promote a European, and particularly British, culture, and the acquisition and appreciation of art was considered an important element in the formation of a stable society. By providing a broad overview of the early years of the gallery, I identify reasons for the choice of acquisitions and explore the impact and reception of a selection of exhibitions. I investigate changes during the 1960s and 1970s through an examination of the Art South Africa Today exhibitions: in addition to opening up institutional spaces to a racially mixed community, these exhibitions marked the beginning of an imperative to show protest art. I argue that, during the political climate of the 1980s, there was a tension in the cultural arena between, on the one hand, a motivation to retain a Western ideal of 'high art' and, on the other, a drive to accommodate the new forms of people's art and to challenge the values and ideological standpoints that had been instrumental in shaping collecting and exhibiting policies in the South African art arena. I explore this tension through a discussion of the Cape Town Triennial exhibitions, organised jointly by all the official museums, which ran alongside more inclusive and independently curated exhibitions, such as Tributaries, which were shown mainly outside the country. The post-1994 period marked an opening up of spaces, both literally and conceptually. This openness was manifest in the revised strategies that were introduced to show the Durban Art Gallery 's permanent collection as well as in two key public projects that were started - Red Eye @rt and the AIDS 2000 ribbon. Through an examination of these strategies and initiatives, I argue that the central role of the Durban Art Gallery has shifted from being a repository to providing an interactive public space.

Thesis (MA (VA)(Visual Arts))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009.
This thesis aims to assess the extent to which the African curated exhibition, Dak’Art: Biennale de l’art africain contemporain , succeeds in subverting hegemonic Western representations of African art as necessarily ‘exotic’ and ‘Other.’ My investigation of the Dak’Art biennale in this thesis is informed and preceded by a study of evolutionist assumptions towards African art and the continuing struggle for command over the African voice. I outline the trajectory of African art from primitive artifact to artwork, highlighting the prejudices that have kept Africans from being valued as equals and unique artists in their own right. I then look at exhibiting techniques employed to move beyond perceptions of the tribal, to subvert the exoticising tendency of the West and remedy the marginalised position of the larger African artistic community.

Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2001.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Botanical art consists of a complex combination of scientific fact and aesthetic awareness, and is concerned with more than the realistic representation of a plant and its flowers. It goes beyond the visual description of scientific information and speaks about the contributions artists have made through history to the conventions of both art and science. It contains a unique visual language, conventions which we read intelligently and an evolved tradition, and it is this language and the development of these conventions within the genre of South African botanical art, which this thesis investigates. In South Africa botanical art developed as a direct result of European interest in the flora and the colonisation of this country by the West. A brief history of responses to South African plants is discussed in the Introduction in order to begin to establish an understanding of this tradition and to contextualise the contributions made by 19th-and 20th -century South African botanical artists. Now that postmodernity has called for the reassessment and questioning of 'given truths', alternative ways of assessing botanical art are slowly evolving. Through study and the comparison of botanical art and artists of South Africa their evaluation as artists is reconsidered. This issue of defining art and artists is the subject of Chapter One of this study. Some of the factors that have a bearing on this include: relationships between text and image; art and science; art and illustration; and how society's expectations of gender roles affect the production of botanical art. In order to establish a context from which to discuss plant imagery in South Africa, it is important to study the history and development of botanical art in this country. Chapter Two discusses the emergence and development of this art form and its artists, starting with a short description of people and events from the 1600s and then takes a comprehensive look at developments in the 19th and 20m centuries. For the artists working within the genre of botanical art, the conventions and inventions are often explicitly formulated. It is an art based on the logic, scrutiny and informative tradition of science, where the main objective is to represent a plant's structural essence. Fundamental to our response to botanical art, however, is the style and technique employed by the artist. Chapter Three is devoted to a detailed discussion of the work of selected contemporary South African botanical art and artists. By comparing their work it is possible to establish trends and developments in representation and the role played by mediums and techniques in this highly skilled art form. Since this research has both a theoretical and a practical component, Chapter Four is devoted to discussion of my own work within the botanical art genre. I describe and illustrate several related series of paintings and explore established conventions and ways of developing my own stylistic identity as a botanical artist.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Botaniese kuns bestaan uit 'n komplekse kombinasie van wetenskaplike feite en estetiese bewustheid, en is gemoeid met baie meer as net die realistiese voorstelling van 'n plant en sy blomme. Dit gaan verder as net die blote visuele uitbeelding van wetenskaplike informasie, en behels die bydraes wat kunstenaars deur die geskiedenis tot die konvensies van beide kuns en die wetenskap gemaak het. Botaniese kuns besit 'n unieke visuele taal, konvensies wat intelligent gelees word, en 'n ontwikkelde tradisie. Hierdie tesis ondersoek juis hierdie spesiale taal en ontwikkeling van konvensies binne die genre van Suid-Afrikaanse botaniese kuns. Botaniese kuns in Suid-Afrika het ontwikkel as In direkte gevolg van Europese belangstelling in die flora, en Westerse kolonialisasie van hierdie land. In die Inleidingword daar kortliks gekyk na die geskiedenis van die hantering van Suid-Afrikaanse plante, en het ten doelom eerstens 'n begrip van hierdie tradisie daar te stel, en tweedens om die bydraes van 19de en 20ste eeuse Suid-Afrikaanse botaniese kunstenaars te kontekstualiseer. Sedert Postmodernisme die herevaluering en bevraagtekening van gegewewe waarhede aangewakker het, is die ontwikkeling van alternatiewe maniere van kyk na botaniese kuns stadig besig om plaas te vind. Deur die bestudering en vergelyking van botaniese kuns en kunstenaars van Suid-Afrika, word die botaniese kunstenaar se status as kunstenaar uitgelig. Hierdie kwessie oor die defmieëring van kuns en kunstenaars is die onderwerp van Hoofstuk 1 van hierdie werkstuk. 'n Paar van die faktore wat In invloed op laasgenoemde het, sluit in: verhoudinge tussen beeld en teks; kuns en wetenskap; kuns en illustrasie; en hoe kwessies van geslag soos waargeneem deur die samelewing die produsering van botaniese kuns beïnvloed. Dit is belangrik om die geskiedenis en ontwikkeling van botaniese kuns in Suid-Afrika te bestudeer, sodat daar 'n konteks geskep kan word waarbinne die afbeelding van plante in hierdie land bespreek kan word. Hoofstuk 2 behandel die totstandkoming en ontwikkeling van hierdie kunsvorm en sy kunstenaars, en begin met 'n kort beskrywing van mense en gebeurtenisse van die 1600s wat gevolg word deur 'n uitgebreide kyk na ontwikkelinge gedurende die 19de en 20ste eeue. Vir die kunstenaars wat werk binne die genre van botaniese kuns, is die konvensies en bevindings van die medium dikwels breedvoerig geformuleer. Dit is 'n kunsvorm gebasseer op die logiese, navorsbare en insiggewende tradisie van die wetenskap, waar die hoofdoel die voorstelling van 'n plant se strukturele essensie is. Fundementeel in die benadering tot botaniese kuns is die styl en tegniek wat deur die kunstenaar gebruik word. Hoofstuk 3 word gewy aan 'n gedetailleerde bespreking van die werk van geselekteerde kontemporêre Suid-Afrikaanse bot~iese kuns en kunstenaars. Deur hul werk te vergelyk is dit moontlik om tendense en ontwikkelings in die voorstelling en aanbieding van botaniese kuns te bepaal, en wat die rol van verskillende mediums en tegnieke in hierdie hoogs geskoolde kunsvorm behels. Weens die feit dat hierdie navorsing uit 'n teoretiese en praktiese komponent bestaan, word Hoofstuk 4 gewy aan 'n bespreking van my praktiese werk binne die genre van botaniese kuns. Ek beskryf en illustreer verskeie verwante reekse werke en kyk na bestaande konvensies en die maniere hoe my eie stilistiese identiteit as botaniese kunstenaar kan ontwikkel binne die medium.

Bibliography: pages 37-38.
The work undertaken for my Masters degree seeks to address some of the prejudice experienced by disabled people. Society's concept of a normal body prescribes unattainable standards for people with disabilities, thereby isolating and marginalising them. Instead of accommodating these physical differences, society encourages disabled people to withdraw from society or to try to conform to able-bodied ideals and to appear 'as normal as possible'. The very physical presence of disabled people challenges these assumptions of normality. Therefore, attempts are made to cosmetically hide the offending part or exclude the person from society (e.g. a hollow shirt sleeve or 'special' school). When individuals fail to conform to the prescribed standards of normality, they face the stigma of being viewed as pitifully inferior and dependent upon their able-bodied counterparts. In this way disabled people do not 'suffer' so much from their condition, as from the oppression of able-bodied biases. Through different eyes, society could be seen as handicapped as a result of its inability to adapt to, or deal with difference. In reality, however, disabilities are experienced by many people and can range from those which are physically visible and easily identified to those less obvious, but often more debilitating such as abrasive, socially aggressive personalities or learning disabilities. It is possible, therefore, to extend the understanding of the term disability to any physical or emotional impairment that limits a person's functioning within a so-called normal society. Although many people and organisations have searched for less pejorative or negative terms to describe an impairment such as 'Very Special', 'people with abilities' or 'physically challenged', these attempts have failed to reverse prejudice. Instead, these descriptions have only re-described the emphasis on 'otherness' and 'difference'. In addition, these replaced descriptions are again associated with the same stigmas that they were intentionally designed to avoid. In the following discussion I have consciously used the word disabled or disability to refer to individuals with various disabilities which I have nevertheless defined as socially constructed. In doing so I am suggesting no pejorative associations. Through this project I wanted to explore notions of disability within various debates associated with disability and society. I have done this in the context of my own experience of disability, and my own attempts to come to terms with disability. In this sense this project represents a personal journey.

This thesis will examine the practice of relational aesthetics as it involves the viewer, as well as the way in which it plays out within and outside of the institutional setting of the museum. I will focus primarily on two unique projects: that of The Machine Project Field Guide at Los Angeles County Museum of Art on November 15, 2008, produced by Machine Project, a social project operated out of a storefront gallery in Echo Park; and David Michalek's Slow Dancing at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City, July 12-29 2007.

In 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called St. Augustine, Florida, the most racist city in America. The resulting demonstrations and violence in the summer of 1964 only confirmed King’s characterization of the city. Yet, St. Augustine’s black history has its origins with the Spanish who founded the city in 1565. With little racial disturbance until the modern civil rights movement, why did St. Augustine erupt in the way it did? With the beginnings of Jim Crow in Florida around the turn of the century in 1900, St. Augustine’s black community began to resist the growing marginalization of their community. Within the confines of the predominantly black neighborhood known as Lincolnville, the black community carved out their own space with a culture, society and economy of its own. This paper explores how the African American community within St. Augustine developed a racial solidarity and identity facing a number of events within the state and nation. Two world wars placed the community’s sons on the front lines of battle but taught them to value of fighting for equality. The Great Depression forced African Americans across the South to rely upon one another in the face of rising racial violence. Florida’s racial violence cast a dark shadow over the history of the state and remained a formidable obstacle to overcome for African Americans in the fight for equal rights in the state. Although faced with few instances of violence against them, African Americans in St. Augustine remained fully aware of the violence others faced in Florida communities like Rosewood, Ocoee and Marianna. St. Augustine’s African American community faced these obstacles and learned to look inward for support and empowerment rather than outside. This paper examines the factors that vii encouraged this empowerment that translates into activism during the local civil rights movement of the 1960s.

A Research report submitted in partial fulfilment of the Degree Masters in History of Arts at the University of Witwatersrand, 2017
This research report has followed three periods in the history of the political struggle for freedom in South Africa, from the height of the Anti-apartheid struggle in the 1980s to the present day by way of exploring three exhibitions of resistance posters as case studies. It is located in the realm of political and art history. Looking at the positioning of the resistance poster in South African art history, the intension is to highlight how these exhibitions have used display strategies to construct values reflected in the resistance poster. The three selected exhibitions are as follows: firstly, Thami Mnyele and Medu Art Ensemble Retrospective (2008), Second is the exhibition Images of Defiance: South African poster of the 1980’s (2004). And the third exhibition Interruptions: Posters from the Community Arts Project Archive (2014).
XL2018

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements of Master of Arts, Durban 2018
This dissertation examines the social, cultural and economic significance of locally forged field-hoes, known as amageja in Zulu. A key question I have engaged in this study is whether gender-based divisions of labour in nineteenth-century African communities of this region, which largely consigned agricultural work to women, also affect attitudes towards the tools they used. I argue that examples of field-hoes held in eight museum collections form an important but neglected archive of “hoeculture”, the form of subsistence crop cultivation based on the use of manual implements, within the Phongolo-Mzimkhulu geographic region that roughly approximates to the modern territory of KwaZulu-Natal. In response to observations made by Maggs (1991), namely that a disparity exists in the numbers of fieldhoes collected by museums in comparison with weapons, I conducted research to establish the present numbers of amageja in these museums, relative to spears in the respective collections. The dissertation assesses the historical context that these metallurgical artefacts were produced in prior to the twentieth-century and documents views on iron production, spears and hoes or agriculture recorded in oral testimony from African sources, as well as Zulu-language idioms that make reference to hoes. I furthermore examine the collecting habits and policies of private individuals and museums in this region from the nineteenthcentury onwards, and the manner in which hoes are used in displays, in order to provide recommendations on how this under-utilised category of material culture should be incorporated into future exhibitions.
XL2019

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for MA by Coursework and Research Report, Johannesburg, 2017
This research report explores the influences of memory in selected works by two visual artists: South African Kemang Wa Lehulere’s Remembering the Future of a Hole as a Verb 2.1 and Polish artist Ursula von Rydingsvard’s Droga. The report examines the ways in which personal memory can inform creative practice and the surface difficulties such endeavours may present. These works and writings on memory and creative practice inform my own practice, through which I investigate ways of expressing my memories of my grandparents’ carpentry workshop in Sunnydale Eshowe in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.
XL2018

The research on Russian painting of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century in the context of early and modern African culture/art belongs to the realm of theoretical reflection within such disciplines as cultural geography, anthropology of place and space, cultural and existential experience, geocriticism (painterly depictions of natural and urban space), geopoetics (painterly topography), and is interdisciplinary in nature. The analysis of Russian-African interdisciplinary dialogue in visual representations of Africa, as an aspect of the Russians’ awareness and idea of this continent, requires an answer to the following questions: what attracted Russian artists to Africa and how did it influence Russian culture/art? And the other way round – what did Russians, especially those travelling through Africa, bring to African culture? In Russian painting, which is diverse in terms of genres (landscape, portrait, still life), Africa functions as a nationally, culturally and socially heterogeneous continent. The early and modern African aesthetics/ art is the source of inspiration for iconographic and formal innovations. In iconic texts, visual translation, representation and interpretation of Africa manifests itself at the imagination-related levels: at thematic and motivic, narrative and compositional levels, at the level of a painterly code and in the conceptualization of artistic language. The painterly depiction of Africa, to which each of the Russian artists contributes their own representation types, artefacts, poetics and semantics, is usually created on the basis of the observation of real space, which, transformed in the iconic text, functions in an artistic, aesthetic, ideological and emotional projection. The reflection focuses on the painterly depictions and various representations of Africa which include motifs referring to African culture/art – the effect of ethnographic and artistic travels to various regions of the Dark Continent. The exemplary material selected from albums, Internet exhibitions of Russian paintings and artists’ professional websites has been analysed in terms of iconography (identification of the elements of the represented world and the relations between them), the connection between the title of the work and the visual representation, the formal determinants of the painterly depiction of Africa, and the poetics of reception.

Reinterpreting the works of choreographers Kariamu Welsh and Ronald K. Brown as ethnographies of Brooklyn, New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, Indira Etwaroo situates Welsh’s and Brown’s respective bodies of work from two historical periods as artistic expressions shaped by the Great Migration, the Black Arts and Black Power movements, and the daily realities of mid and late 20th Century African-American urban life. As examples of “Neo-traditional African dance,” Etwaroo explores how Welsh and Brown recalibrated traditional African dance aesthetics for North American and European performance contexts that were quite distinct from those rooted in traditional African societies. As Welsh and Brown addressed current African-American political events in their works, they secured a contemporary relevance for the historically rooted dance aesthetics they pioneered. Etwaroo also places Welsh and Brown within a long tradition of African-American dance choreographers and explores Welsh’s influence on Brown as evidence of an established neo-traditional African dance ethos in the United States, which constitutes a tradition in its own right.

The task of reviewing the silences present in hegemonic histories emerges at the beginning of the 20th century, seeking to provide a more amplified way of understanding the history of peoples and nations subjected to colonial subjugation. Rufino (2019) considers that this space of decolonization presents itself under the name of “encruzilhada” (crossroads) and understands the potentialities of the orixá Exu, of Yoruba spirituality: the orixá of communication, of the paths and the guardian of axé (vital energy). Exu disarray what exist to reconstruct— therefore, since the encruzilhada is Exu’s place, it is a space that allows the crossing of knowledge produced as deviations from colonial impositions on so-called official knowledge, a process which the author names “cruzo” (cross): the encruzilhada is a refusal to everything put as absolute; Exu is the movement of that encruzilhada. In addition to the positivization of the knowledge and ways of living of peoples who have suffered, over the centuries, from numerous processes of inferiority, it is necessary to insert this knowledge in the cultural elements of the present— and in the conceptions about the future. It is in this context that, regarding the experience of Afro-diasporic peoples, a global aesthetic movement that encompasses arts, literature, audiovisual and academic research emerges: Afrofuturism (YASZEK, 2013). Afrofuturism goal is to connect the dilemmas of the African diaspora to technological innovations, commonly unavailable to the descendants of the enslaved, and it aims to establish possible future scenarios— scenarios that contemplate the presence and, furthermore, the protagonism of black people (YASZEK, 2013). To this end, the movement breaks with the Western linear chronology and starts to consider time in a cyclic way, interweaving past, present and future in a single composition: in the same way that Exu, in the Yoruba cosmology, killed a bird yesterday with a stone that has only been thrown today, Afrofuturism weaves a web of historical and cultural retaking of African memory with questions that arise from the reflection of the problems faced by black people in the present, in order to think about a positive and possible future, once a dystopian scenario is already weighing on the shoulders of them. In the frontier of visual arts and design, Luiz Gustavo Nostalgia, a creator based on Rio de Janeiro, dismantles existing images and rearranges them through collages to create a new intention of meaning. His work evokes the cruzo on the principle of rearranging— central to collages— with the widespread rearrangement of our ways of living and understanding society— based on an Afrofuturistic conception of world— by celebrating African motifs, culture and spirituality, allied to the already acquainted aesthetics of “future” (such as the galaxy, bright lights and robotic elements). Through your creation, the artist is capable of presenting a future where black people do exist as protagonists and have their culture, past and roots celebrated.

Resumen: Pedro Vieira de Almeida (Lisboa, 1933 – Matosinhos, 2011) es uno de los más importantes críticos y teóricos de la arquitectura en la segunda mitad del siglo XX en Portugal. En 1963, presenta en la Escuela de Bellas Artes de Oporto una tesis titulada “Ensayo sobre el espacio de la arquitectura”, influida por el pensamiento de Bruno Zevi. Hasta la Revolución de los Claveles (1974), va a compaginar su práctica profesional como arquitecto con una intensa actividad crítica ejercida sobre todo en periódicos y revistas culturales. Desde sus primeros trabajos se evidencia una notable capacidad de utilizar conceptos críticos innovadores en el análisis de obras de arquitectura, lo que será fundamental en sus estudios historicos desarrollados a lo largo de su vida, dados a conocer en publicaciones y exposiciones retrospectivas sobre arquitectos clave. Este ensayo propone una reflexión sobre el legado de Le Corbusier poniendo el aciento en algunos artículos de Vieira de Almeida escritos entre 1965 y 1970, así como en la investigación que ha llevado a cabo en los últimos años de su vida. Esta lectura diacrónica pone de relieve el papel central del maestro franco-suizo en la lectura crítica de Vieira de Almeida del racionalismo, a través de las nociones por él manejadas: “estructura crítica como condición base de la creación”, las vertientes poético-simbólica y mítica de la arquitectura o el concepto de carácter más instrumental de la “espesura”. Abstract: Pedro Vieira de Almeida (Lisbon, 1933 – Matosinhos, 2011) is one of the most prominent critics and theorists of architecture in the second half of the 20th century in Portugal. In 1963, he presented at the Oporto School of Fine Arts a thesis entitled “Essay on architectural space”, clearly influenced by the thoughts of Bruno Zevi. Until the Carnation Revolution (1974), he will combine his professional practice as an architect with an intense critical activity, developed mainly in newspapers and cultural magazines. Since his early work, a remarkable ability to use innovative concepts in the critical analysis of buildings have been put forth, with major consequences in his historiographical studies, developed throughout his life through publications or retrospective exhibitions on key architects. The following paper proposes a reflection on the legacy of Le Corbusier based on Vieira de Almeida’s theoretical work, linking some texts written between 1965 and 1970 with his research carried out in his last years of life. This diachronic study highlights the central role of Le Corbusier in Vieira de Almeida’s critical approach to rationalism, by means of notions as: “criticism as a basic condition of creation”, poetic-symbolic and mythical aspects of architecture, or the more instrumental concept of “thickness”. Palabras clave: Crítica; Teoría; Pedagogía; Poética; Espesura; Ronchamp. Keywords: Critique; Theory; Pedagogy; Poetics; Thickness; Ronchamp DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/LC2015.2015.732