Maria Helena Vieira da Silva

Biography

In 1928 a nineteen-year-old artist from Lisbon came to Paris with her mother to study sculpture. She soon gave up sculpture for painting.

She was born on 13 June 1908 in Lisbon, into the well-off family of a diplomat, Marcos Vieira da Silva. Her father died when she was three, and she grew up with her mother and her maternal grandfather, the founder of the newspaper O Século. The family lived first in Switzerland, later in other countries. From the age of eleven she studied music, drawing and painting, among others in the studio of Emília dos Santos Braga, and then entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Lisbon. In Paris she studied with Fernand Léger, with Antoine Bourdelle in sculpture and with Charles Despiau at the Académie Scandinave, then with Othon Friesz, Charles Dufresne and Henry de Waroquier. Stanley William Hayter taught her engraving at Atelier 17. A few years later, together with her husband, she attended the classes of Roger Bissière at the Académie Ranson. In 1929 she met the Hungarian painter Árpád Szenes, and on 22 February 1930 she married him. Because she had married a foreigner abroad, she lost her Portuguese citizenship, and the couple became stateless.

In 1933 a children’s book, “Kô et Kô, the Two Eskimos”, appeared, with a text by Pierre Guéguen and her illustrations. The gouaches for it made up her first solo exhibition, at Jeanne Bucher’s gallery in Paris, which went on to represent her work. In 1935 an exhibition organised by António Pedro was held in Lisbon, at the UP gallery. At the same time the couple went briefly to Lisbon, and in October 1936 they returned to Paris.

When the war began, they left again for Portugal. Her application for Portuguese citizenship lay unanswered for a year and was then refused; Szenes was Jewish, although he had converted to Catholicism. In 1940 the couple moved to Rio de Janeiro. There Vieira da Silva exhibited at the National Museum of Fine Arts (1942) and at the Askanasy gallery (1944), illustrated magazines, and decorated the refectory of the National School of Agronomy with an azulejo panel, “Kilomètre 44”. In 1943 her work was shown in the exhibition “31 Women” at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in New York, and in 1946 her first solo exhibition in New York took place, at the Marian Willard gallery. In March 1947 she returned to Paris alone; two months later Szenes followed. An exhibition of her Brazilian work at Jeanne Bucher’s gallery drew the attention of the French state, which began buying her paintings, among them “The Chess Game”. In 1952 she was again refused Portuguese citizenship; she received French citizenship, together with her husband, in 1956.

For these years the word that suits her best, to my mind, is “labyrinth”. In the paintings of the 1950s, for example “Red Interior” (1951), a dense grid of lines and small rectangles builds rooms, railway stations, ports and cities seen from above or from the side. Often they look like endless library shelves. Critics place her in non-figurative painting, but she was never purely abstract: her lines are taken from the real world. Cézanne, Cubism and the azulejos of Lisbon mattered to her.

In 1954 she showed work at the Venice Biennale and won a competition for wall hangings woven for the University of Basel. In 1961 she received the international grand prize for painting at the São Paulo Biennial. In 1962 she was made a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters; in 1966 she became the first woman to receive the Grand Prix National des Arts of France; in 1979 she became a Knight of the Legion of Honour. She also made applied work for Paris and Lisbon: engravings for the books of René Char, a stained-glass window for the church of Saint-Jacques in Reims (1966–1976, together with Josef Šíma), and azulejo panels for the Lisbon metro stations Cidade Universitária and Rato. The painting “The Library on Fire” (1974) uses motifs from this window. In 1988, for her eightieth birthday, retrospectives were held at the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon and at the Grand Palais in Paris.

Vieira da Silva died in Paris on 6 March 1992. In November 1994 the Árpád Szenes–Vieira da Silva Foundation opened in Lisbon.