This Artist’s Collection Was a Milestone, and a Lifeline

LISBON, Portugal — For young Portuguese artists starting their careers in the 1990s and 2000s, little was as thrilling as a studio visit from Pedro Cabrita Reis, a sculptor who was not only one of the country’s most celebrated artists but also one of its most significant collectors.

When he started collecting, in 1994, Portugal was still emerging from the effects of a nearly 50-year-long dictatorship that left the country deeply impoverished and underdeveloped — a world apart from much of the rest of Europe.

And while by that time Cabrita Reis’ monumental installations had already won him international acclaim, Portugal’s art scene was still largely anemic. In those years, Cabrita Reis’ support represented nothing short of a lifeline for dozens of emerging talents — and his acquisitions were a sort of seal of approval that helped launch their careers.

“The situation is much better now, but back in the 1990s, being an artist in Portugal was extremely hard. Young artists here didn’t have much support, or good working conditions, or probably even bright futures ahead of them, and there was little chance of gaining any traction internationally,” said Cabrita Reis, 61, in a recent interview. “I came to see collecting as an ethical responsibility.”

Over 11 years, Cabrita Reis acquired nearly 400 pieces that ran the gamut in styles and mediums and included very early work by artists such as Joana Vasconcelos, Carlos Bunga and Rui Toscano, who would go on to become among the most prominent names of their generation in Portugal. “Germinal,” an exhibition drawn from Cabrita Reis’ collection, is at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, known as MAAT, through Dec. 31.

“Pedro is a very generous person, and that generosity translated into concrete support of younger artists,” said Eva Wittocx, senior curator at M, a museum in Leuven, Belgium. “He’s played a super-important role in bringing Portugal into the wider art world.”

Although he often refers to himself as a painter and also has worked extensively over his career of more than 40 years in mediums including photography, etching and drawing, Cabrita Reis is best known for his large-scale installations composed from found objects — old doors and window frames, cast off during home renovations, and chunks of rusted iron, steel beams and florescent lights from defunct factories. Praised by critics as poetic meditations on housing, migration and space, the big, bold pieces have been featured at some of the art world’s most important events, including Documenta and the Venice Biennale, as well as in top-tier galleries and museums including the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. “He is absolutely one of the most important European sculptors working today,” said Nicholas Serota, chairman of Arts Council England and a former director of the Tate galleries in London. “In art, as in life, he makes big, simple gestures that are very powerful.”

Cabrita Reis was born in 1956 into what he described as a “regular, middle-class” Lisbon family and was in his first year of art school during the Carnation Revolution, the 1974 military coup that toppled a nationalist dictatorship that had ruled Portugal for 48 years.

During the uncertain period that followed, Cabrita Reis became involved in a small Marxist-Leninist group and left art school to dedicate himself to politics. He took several blue-collar jobs, in which he tried to stir up revolutionary fervor among his colleagues. In 1979, he devoted himself full-time to art and began making large-scale paintings and sculptures put together with found items.

A self-described “bon vivant,” outspoken in his views and always seen with a Cuban cigar, Cabrita Reis became a favorite of journalists covering Lisbon’s post-revolutionary art scene. Through both the strength of his work and the force of his personality, he leveraged his local acclaim to score his first international show, in Antwerp, in 1987. Two years later, he had a solo show at Bess Cutler Gallery in New York.

As his international reputation grew in the 1990s, Cabrita Reis stumbled into the role of patron for other artists. His collection grew out of near-nightly excursions to gallery openings and other cultural happenings, where he got to know young artists and their work. But it soon hardened into a deliberate exercise, guided by its own strict rules.

Cabrita Reis decided he would collect only emerging Portuguese artists, buying several pieces from each. He would be guided solely by artistic affinity and not by market considerations.

“I let my emotions, my feelings drive me. I bought what I liked from whom I liked,” Cabrita Reis recalled, adding that he tended to opt for the most challenging pieces. “Probably because I’m an artist, my appetite ran toward the most complex, most difficult, most silent and hermetic pieces that require real work to interpret.”

Another guiding principle was to buy directly from artists — never from galleries, which he half-jokingly referred to as “enemy territory.”

“I wanted to make sure all the money went directly to the artists and not to middlemen, who much of the time don’t have the slightest notion what art is,” said Cabrita Reis, who has long refused to be represented by a single gallery, opting instead to work with several in different countries.

In Portugal, he represents himself, showing his work on the ground floor of the cavernous former warehouse in Lisbon’s industrial Marvila neighborhood that also serves as his atelier and apartment.

Cabrita Reis bought in frenetic fits and starts, sometimes acquiring as many as eight pieces in a day. “It became something of an addiction,” he acknowledged.

By the time he quit collecting, cold turkey, in 2005, he had accumulated 388 pieces — videos, oil paintings, sculptures, drawings and installations — all of which had gone straight into a warehouse in a Lisbon suburb. Rules as unbending as those governing the collection also apply in Cabrita Reis’ home, where he allows only his own work in the ground-floor gallery and first-floor atelier, and no art whatsoever in the second-floor loft apartment.

And so the collection remained in storage for over a decade, until Cabrita Reis sold it in 2015 to the EDP Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Portugal’s electricity utility. The foundation runs MAAT, the museum where the works are now on display.

Vasco Araújo, a Lisbon-born artist who works across several mediums, said that for artists of his generation, having work acquired by Cabrita Reis represented a real milestone.

“If Pedro bought your work, it meant you were on the right track,” said Araújo, who has two installations, two sculptures and a drawing in the Cabrita Reis Collection. “It meant that what you were doing was of value.”

Cabrita Reis said he’s eager for the work to be seen by the public so it can finally perform what he regards as art’s intended function.

“It isn’t about being entertaining or pretty,” he said, taking a drag on his cigar. “Art is about expanding intelligence and broadening the viewer’s capacity to understand the world.”

— Event info:

Germinal: The Cabrita Reis Collection, Part of the EDP Foundation Art Collection, through Dec. 31 at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon; maat.pt.