KWY
KWY magazine is a unique moment in the history of art and publishing in Portugal (and here we take on a geographical identity that was never claimed by the creators, who called it ‘from this world’). The three letters of the alphabet – which have been absent from the Portuguese language lexicon since 1911 – were likely to be seen as odd and consequently rejected. The difficulty of enunciation (‘kapa-dâblio-ípsilon’), which would be indecipherable to many, gave the magazine an elitist overtone in Portugal, excluding from the outset anyone who did not have access to a foreign language.
It turned out, however, to be a wise choice, as the name KWY ended up surpassing the initial object – a periodical – to constitute an identity. KWY is the name of a magazine, a collective of artists – the Group, and some publications.
Founded in 1958 by René Bertholo and Lourdes Castro, KWY was born spontaneously on Boulevard Pasteur, in Paris, in the living and work space of two artists. Originally planned as a means of communicating and sharing ideas (a letter from Bertholo to his friends), both content and modus operandi were inseparable from the beginning. Bertholo had discovered a new screen printing silk – a nylon fabric with a very fine weave – that would revolutionize the screen printing technique used until then in Lisbon. This technique allowed replication – in the first issues with low print runs of 60 copies –, but also the use of colour, which made all the difference in an editorial universe where black and white prevailed.
KWY, an object-magazine, was built around the web of relationships created or strengthened by its members, without announcing any program, affiliation, or manifesto. Friends who knew each other from Fine Arts school and gatherings at the Café Gelo, in Lisbon, such as Costa Pinheiro, Gonçalo Duarte, João Vieira, and José Escada, naturally made up the magazine's editorial board. It was they who, as early as 1957, in an interview given to Diário Ilustrado (17 Dec) about the exhibition held at the Lisbon Law Faculty Student Association, revealed the difficulty of working and living from painting in Portugal. They would eventually emigrate to Munich, Paris, and London, temporarily receiving Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation scholarships. These expatriates were joined by two foreigners, the German Jan Voss, with whom Lourdes, René, and Costa Pinheiro had met in Munich in 1957, and the Bulgarian Christo Javacheff, a recent friendship from Paris. The eight formed the KWY Group, which from 1960 onwards presented itself as a collective in exhibitions.
The magazine's premise was the same that characterized the group's plastic identity: experimentation. José Gil, who contributed to the magazine, defines each copy as an artistic object: ‘If you pay attention to the way it was made, hand-printed, with a limited run of initially a few dozen copies, combining original prints, object fragments (record, glued papers, wire) with photographs, comic book images, etc.’ Interestingly, the publication of the magazine (1958-1963) preceded and survived the Group (1960-1962), whose full complement was only present in four exhibitions (Saarbrücken and Lisbon in 1960, Paris in 1961, and Bologna in 1962). Like other contemporary art collectives, such as the French Nouveau Réalisme or the American Fluxus, the KWY group valued the artistic process inherent to the work, but, unlike the El Paso group, which ‘was born as a group with a conscious intention of cultural action, KWY became a group in the sharing which occurred between artists still searching for their individual projects’1.
According to Lourdes Castro, what united the Group was not the aesthetic trends, but the fact that they were friends: people who had (re)encountered one another or whose work was admired. Plastic artists, writers, and poets gravitated around the magazine. Collaborations were published following invitations, and, in the magazine’s first issues, the number of Portuguese presences was evident. From issue 6, which began print runs of more than 500 copies – before returning to 300, an amount that they effectively managed to sell – onwards, there is a clear increase in foreign artists and intellectuals.
The first issues of the magazine stand out for the literary and poetic collaborations of Helder Macedo, João Lopes Vidal, Herberto Helder, Nuno de Bragança, José-Augusto França, Manuel de Castro, Luiz de Macedo, Pedro Tamen, Sebastião Fonseca, Alfredo Margarido, José Manuel Simões, Cristovam Pavia, António Areal, José Gil, Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos, and António Ramos Rosa. In the plastic arts, alongside Group members, appears Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, a major name in the Parisian artistic circle, who accepted to collaborate with two silkscreen prints in different issues. This collaboration came about because of the friendship – of both the artist and her husband, the painter Arpad Szenes – with the collective, in particular with Lourdes Castro, an affinity that lasted throughout the couple's life and is documented in photographic and epistolary records. In addition to Vieira, Arpad Szenes and the artist and art critic Guy Weelen also collaborated in the magazine. Manuel Cargaleiro and Jorge Martins, living in Paris at the time, are also represented.
The fact that all members of the Group were living outside their country of origin, in contact with new realities and challenges – people, exhibitions, artistic productions, events, publications – contributed to the growing cosmopolitanism of the magazine. At the same time, the Group's foreign elements – Voss and Christo – took on the editorial responsibility for the magazine (issues 9 and 11) and brought to KWY's pages current key figures, in particular Restany’s Nouveaux Réalistes, with their sense of the globalizing power of urban culture.
The magazine ended after issue 12, without prior announcement or planning, by tacit agreement of the Group. Committed to their artistic research and unable to dedicate themselves to a project that threatened to become part of the zeitgeist, to the detriment of their total – aesthetic and programmatic – freedom, they chose to bring the publication to a close, alleging superstitious reasons. Lourdes Castro edited the last issue, in Album format. The set of 54 illustrated postcards, with works by various collaborators over the years, maintained the criterion of playfulness and unexpectedness shared by all issues: postcards that could be detached, reducing the magazine to its front and back cover and making it – as desired – a container of absences or memories.
Sandra Brás dos Santos
Fernando Dias, “El Paso e KWY: um diálogo ibérico (em Paris)”, in KWY. Paris 1958-1968, Lisboa, Centro Cultural de Belém, Assírio & Alvim, 2001, p. 64.↩︎
