Portugal is the title of one of the two enormous murals-both now lost-that Sonia Terk Delaunay made for the Railroad Pavilion, one of a pair of temporary buildings devoted to honoring recent advances in transportation at the Paris World's Fair of 1937. Planned to fit in with the scheme of the building-which had been designed to look like a real train station, complete with ticket booth, café, and magazine stand-Delaunay's painting comprised four large segments, the impact of which can only be imagined today through black-and-white photographs and this preparatory sketch.

This painting reveals Delaunay's typical emphasis on forms constructed entirely from vivid colors, rather than from lines. Although everything is highly stylized, it is clear that she has depicted peasant women and men, an ox cart, houses, several boats, and-in the background of all four sections-an aqueduct, the arches of which seem to get lower and lower as the imaginary train carrying the viewer moves from left to right.

The title of the work, and some of its imagery, presumably derive from the artist's memories of the years she spent in Spain and Portugal during World War I. Its repeated, interlocking shapes and surprising splashes of color reflect not only orphism but also the rapid pace of the many changes that occurred in modern art and life during the first decades of the twentieth century.