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discreet artist, an opposite to radicalism and aesthetic sensasionalism, Abel Manta never fixed himself on such or such school as he allways declined to join any fine art's tendency. His painting can't be set in one of those drawers one uses to divide History of Art. It resists to simple and pure classification. It is a synthesis painting, the result of a continuous addition of lessons, experiences, of others for the most part and of variable weight, where the whole is something more than the sum of the parts inthe sense that it displays his personal mark. .

     As we look at his long career, built along the space of almost one century, some periods can be detected. In a first stage, the paintig of Abel Manta shows clearly the influence of his teachers that in the Lisbon Fine Arts School helped to mould the natural skill he brought from Gouveia, his birthplace. What we find in the «Primeiro Auto-Retrato» («First Self-Portrait»), «Menina da Havaneza» («Young Lady at Havaneza»), and «O Jóia» are quotations from LucianoFreire, Ernesto Condeixa and, most of all, Carlos Reis, compositions marked by a certain barbizonesque naturalism that Silva Porto had brought from France almost at the end of the XIXth century and that the academicist milieu of Lisbon insistid in following after the first decades of the next century.

     Though oficially praised and prized the artist must have taken conscience of a certain degree of mediocrity of the work he then produced and at the some time he was discovering that the painting was not that open window looking at the Nature that his former masters of art commended. To part with this overstepd way of seeing became an obsession. At the end of Great War First, and as many of his fellow painters, Manta exchanged Lisbon for Paris.

     A second period in the painter’s work begins exactly when he arrives at the capital of Impressionism. To his naturalistic apprenticeship he at once adjoined the absorption he did from Manet’s art, the first he noticed there. His understanding of the french master's lesson, can be seen in the portrais he then painted of sculptor João da Silva and of some relatives of Aquilino Ribeiro. The background of these compositions appears like a flat, bidimensional area, the whole like a playing card, especially the portrait of Anibal Ribeiro.

     But Manta didn’t stay there. He immediately followed the footsepts of post-impressionism. After a brief stage with the fauvism of the first Matisse which can be detected in La Servante, he settled at Cézanne. In this forerunner of Modern Art he found the structure, the grammar which lacked his plastic language, and thus he didn’t need to go farer.

     Whith these lessons in his baggage, some of them not totally assimilated, in the mid twenties Manta returned to Portugal to take with enthusiasm his work as a painter. Till the middle of the following decade he did a great amount of painting work all presenting some common characteristics, each one varying its intensity according to the composition.

     The simplification of form now reduced to a simple structure, is evident. The unifying perspective of pictorial space changes itself in a sentient perspective, wich has nothing to do neither with the distance between each body and the observer, nor with the force of gravity but, on the contrary, with the composition exigencies of each work. At last, the volumes appear faceted, but not so far that they become wide spots. Works with the aforesaid characteristics are, for instance, «Vista de Gouveia» («Landscape at Gouveia»), «As Maçãs» («The Apples»), «Sé do Funchal» («The See of Funchal»), «Partida de Damas» («The Checkers' Game»), «Fumador de Cachimbo» («Pipe Smoker»), «O Violinista Bohet» («The Fiddler Bohet»), «Rua de São Bernardo» («São Bernardo Street») and «Natureza morta com Safio» («Still Life with Conger»).

     Even if trough all these canvases the painter remains faithfull to the figurative, the reality we can find in them is very filtrate through his way of looking, deformed by his modernist procupations. And if, in a certain way, this is not new at all in what regards the portuguese painting, - others had advanced him, as is the case of Amadeo (Souza-Cardoso) and (Eduardo) Viana for instance -, the same is not valid for another form of plastic expression: the stained glass. While conceiving the drawings for the great window above the flight of stairs of the Instituto Nacional de Estatística and also for that one that surmounts the main portico of Jeronimos Church in the same city (1933 and 1934, respectively) Abel Manta reconquered the stained glass for the modern portuguese art.
     A third period in the work of the master from Gouveia, begins to show in the mid thirties and goes till the end of his career. Its origin may have been the results of a concourse for the teaching vacancy Columbano had left in the Lisbon School of Fine Arts in 1934. Victim of a little bigot conspiration Manta felt himself unjustly passed over in favour of Henrique Franco, though his examination work was much superior to the one presented by this mediocre artist, brother of sculptor Francisco Franco.

     From then on, what we can see is a painter leanend over his own art. Open at the most on ly to the classics that he revisited and studied during his journeys trough Europe. His work appears now more linked to the themes than to composition demands. The canvases cease to represent the cezannian strucural strength - almost sketches they seemed... - to present now a fastidious, even delicate finishing. Faithfulness to reality becomes more evident even if the artist never comes to unnecessary details. It is a more refined and therefore less spontaneous painting the one in compositions like «Auto-Retrato com Paleta» («Self-Portrait with Palette»), «Tejo», «Rosas Amarelas» («Yellow Roses») and the «Último Auto-Retrato» («Last Self-Portrait»). To the initial influence of Carlos Reis followed by that of Manet and Cézanne, the painter added now Rafael, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Halls, Ingres and Degas.

     Long indeed was that last piece of Manta's career. The artist took all his time to portrait much and varied people of portuguese society, mostly intelectuals. And if to these portraits rich of a deep psychological insight, we add the former ones more responsive to plastic concerns, a new face of his work can be detected. Our painter accomplishing functions formerly performed by Columbano, created the greatest portrait gallery of contemporary Portugal.