Sebastião Rodrigues

Sebastião Rodrigues was one of the leading graphic designers in Portugal in the second half of the 20th century. He studied at the Escola Industrial Marquês de Pombal in Lisboa in 1940/41. For financial reasons, he had to discontinue his studies and began to produce graphics for the newspaper A Voz.

From 1945, Rodrigues worked for an agency for artistic advertising in Lisboa, where the influence of neorealism in his work became evident. From 1948, he produced various works for the National Information Secretariat (SNI) in the studio of Manuel Rodrigues. These works correlated with the modernist movement and the “culture of good taste” that characterized the cultural production of the dictatorial “Estado Novo” in Portugal after 1940. In 1954, he spent one year in Brazil.

Sebastião Rodrigues worked in advertising, designed exhibitions and took on the graphic design of books. Together with other artists, he also worked for the magazine Almanaque. He largely retained his modernist style over the course of time.

In 1976, Rodrigues was a founding member of the Portuguese Designers Association. He participated in numerous exhibitions and received several awards. In 1995, he was appointed Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the President of the Republic. Suffering from cancer, he had to stop working in 1989. His submitted Poster or the underlying gouache from 1952 is unknown; hardly any sporting motifs appear in his work.