José Dias Coelho

He was born in Pinhel on 19 June 1923. In 1942 he entered the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, first in Architecture and then in Sculpture, and was active in the MUNAF, the MUD and the MUD Juvenil (Youth Movement of Democratic Unity).¹² He organised the General Exhibitions of Visual Arts, which were held at the National Society of Fine Arts outside the control of the SNI, and where artists hostile to the regime showed their work.¹³ Arrested by the PIDE on 6 January 1949, during the campaign of Norton de Matos, he was held incommunicado for ten days in the Aljube.²¹

In 1952, for having led the protests of the Fine Arts students, he was dismissed from his post as a technical-school teacher and expelled from the school, and he was banned from entering any other faculty in the country. In 1955 he went underground as a full-time PCP worker and left his career as a sculptor behind. The clandestine house he shared with his partner, Margarida Tengarrinha, housed the party’s document-forging office, and from 1960 the two of them drew for the clandestine press.¹

He was a member of the leadership of the Lisbon Regional Organisation and was in charge of the PCP’s intellectual sector when, on 19 December 1961, PIDE agents pursued him from Rua dos Lusíadas and shot him dead outside no. 30 Rua da Creche, in Alcântara.¹² The street has borne his name since an edict of 17 February 1975.³ José Afonso commemorated him in the song “A Morte Saiu à Rua” (Death Went Out into the Street).¹