Maria Helena Vieira da Silva
1908-1992Born in Lisbon, the painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908-1992) moved to Paris in 1928 to become one of the major figures of post-war art, one of the few female artists to gain international fame in the 1950s. In her painting, described as “abstract landscape art,” Vieira focused her attention and her practice on the question of perspective. Her central subject was the city.
With infinite meticulousness, the painter built her paintings with a rare attention to detail, based on a principle of composition adopted in the mid-1930s: a network of interwoven lines, checkerboards and wefts where colour plays an essential role, creating an ambiguous spatiality. The moving eye travels through the work, gets lost in it, as in a labyrinth, and seeks to identify landscapes by mobilising its own memory. These evocative surfaces are offered to viewers as psychological spaces, possibilities of reflection revealing all the complexity of the world.
A number of influences enriched Vieira’s practice and allowed her to develop her unique way of capturing reality in a fragmented way: the avant-garde, discovered in Paris; Cubism, geometric abstraction and Futurism; the painters of the Renaissance, discovered during a trip to Siena in the summer of 1928, which fascinated her for their sense of perspective; Paul Cézanne, for his fragmented construction of space; Pierre Bonnard, for his perspectives; and finally, from her childhood, azulejos, the multicoloured ceramic tiles typical of Portuguese architecture which undoubtedly led her very early on towards the fragmentation of space and networked construction.
Audiences discovered her paintings from her first solo exhibition at the Jeanne Bucher gallery in 1933. From then on, the pace of exhibitions around the world was sustained and her works soon became included in the most prestigious collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. In 1990, the Árpád Szenes – Vieira da Silva Foundation was created in Lisbon to promote the artist’s work.
Vieira received many awards, including the Grand Prix de Peinture at the São Paulo Biennale in 1961 and the Grand Prix national des Arts from the French government in 1966, which she was the first woman to receive. She was also awarded high honours. She was made Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1962 and Knight of the Legion of Honour in 1979. The City of Lisbon awarded her the City Medal in 1988, and the Royal Academy of London named her an Honorary Member in the same year.
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“The beauty of the work is precisely this channelled power, this burst seen in a sort of slow motion. A severe discipline, hidden by the light play, the apparent improvisation of lines and colours, determines the slightest brush stroke, which is never exceeded by temperament. Or rather, this temperament, in Vieira da Silva’s work, is temperance, order, orchestration. What is surprising is this rule, this intense, medium-like expression of the inner world. Rigour and freedom are exultantly married in her work.”
Michel Seuphor
Artworks
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva
Intérieur, 1951
Oil on canvas
46,5 x 55,5 cm | 18 1/4 x 21 7/8 in.


Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, L'observatoire
1957

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Les irrésolutions résolues XXV
1969

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Composition
1982

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Largo
1971
Art Fairs
Selections
Artists
- Karel Appel
- Victor Brauner
- Alberto Burri
- Alexander Calder
- Lynn Chadwick
- Geneviève Claisse
- Claudine Drai
- Jean Dubuffet
- Maurice Estève
- Sam Francis
- Simon Hantaï
- Hans Hartung
- Le Corbusier
- Fernand Léger
- Mao Lizi
- Georges Mathieu
- Alicia Penalba
- Serge Poliakoff
- Judit Reigl
- Jean-Paul Riopelle
- Gérard Schneider
- Pierre Soulages
- Geer van Velde
- Victor Vasarely
- Bernar Venet
- Claude Viallat
- Maria Helena Vieira da Silva
- Ossip Zadkine