The painting “School for Little Witches”, by the Portuguese artist Paula Rego, sold on Wednesday for 415,000 pounds (500,000 euros) at auction in London, above Christie's estimate. Dating from 2009, the 154 x 121 cm painting shows a group of children and their adult caregivers, “as if they were clients of an absurd day care center”, can be read in the essay about the work, published by the auctioneer.

Militant and staunch supporter of the Surrealist movement, Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos (1923-2006) wrote, painted and drew, in exactly this order, from the age of 19. His work, both poetic and plastic, contributes to the construction of contemporary history. The painter stood out in the artistic panorama by rejecting any technical and formal concerns, having been the first to create a surrealist collage in post-war Portugal. His career was intense, with the two areas, visual arts and writing, continually interconnecting, as his poems gave rise to paintings and vice versa.Discover part of his vast poetic work through the five excerpts published in this...

Júlio Pomar was one of the artists with the greatest impact on the Portuguese arts of the 20th century, since the beginning of his career.For seven decades it managed to constantly reinvent itself, whether in the techniques and means used or in artistic movements. Among modern Portuguese painters, Júlio Pomar is one of the few — as Paula Rego — whose figuration, not only human, is the main theme. Many were the animals portrayed by Júlio Pomar: the pig, the monkey, the tiger, the crow, the elephant, the giraffe, the deer, the turtle, the bull, the cat, the horse, the dog, the lobo,...