María-Helena Vieira da Silva

Hélène Carlson, New York
M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., New York
Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, 8 October 1986, Lot 273
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Rio de Janeiro, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Vieira da Silva, 1942, no. 27
Stockholm, Galerie Blanche, Vieira da Silva, 1950, no. 11
São Paulo, Museu de Arte, Vieira da Silva nas Colecções Portuguesas, 1987
Lisbon, Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, Ponte sobre os Mares, 1988-89, illustrated in colour
Madrid, Fundación Juan March, Vieira da Silva, 1991, p. 35, no. 4, illustrated; illustrated in detail on the exhibition poster
Lisbon, Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva, Quatro olhares sobre a cidade, 1997, illustrated in colour
Lisbon, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (on temporary loan 1991-2001)

Jean-Pierre Chabloz, Pintura, Maria-Helena Vieira da Silva, 1942, illustrated
Pierre Descargues, Vieira da Silva, Paris 1949, no. 2, illustrated (dated incorrectly as 1941)
Mário de Lurdes Teixeira, 'Vida, romance e arte de Maria-Helena Vieira da Silva', in Folha de Manhã, 20 July, São Paulo 1952
José Augusto França, Vieira da Silva, Lisbon 1958, p. 7, no. 5, illustrated
Léon Kochnitzky, 'Maria-Helena Vieira da Silva', in Quadrum, No. XII, Brussels 1961, p. 46, illustrated
Mário Dionísio, 'Lopes Graça e Vieira da Silva', in Vida Literária e Artistica, no. 436, 8 December, Lisbon 1966, illustrated
Guy Weelen, 'L'univers mystérieux de Vieira da Silva', in La Nouvelle Critique, no. 7 (188), Paris 1967, p. 32, illustrated
Dora Vallier, La Peinture de Vieira da Silva: Chemins d'approche, Paris 1971, p. 76, illustrated
Anon., ' Marie-Helena Vieira da Silva', in ALPHA encyclopédie, 15 November, Paris 1972, p. 6069, illustrated
Jacques Lassaigne & Guy Weelen, Vieira da Silva, Barcelona 1978, no. 151, illustrated
Léopold Sédar Senghor, 'La leçon de Vieira da Silva ou puissance d'émotion et finesse d'expression', in Le Soleil, 10 December, Dakar 1980, illustrated
Nelson Alfredo Aguilar, Figuration et spatialisation dans la peinture moderne Brésilienne: le séjour de Vieira da Silva au Brésil (1940-1947), Lyon 1984, p. 160, illustrated
Jacques Lassaigne & Guy Weelen, Vieira da Silva, Paris 1987, no. 151, illustrated
Claude Roy, Vieira da Silva, Barcelona 1988, pp. 17-19
Anon., 'Vieira da Silva, Poesía, rigor y silencio', in Epoca, no. 328, 13-23 June, Madrid 1991, illustrated
Maria João Fernandes, 'The universe of Vieira da Silva', in Artes & Leilões, no. 10, June-Septembe, Lisbon 1991, p. 30, illustrated; illustrated in detail on the cover
Anon., 'Vieira da Silva: antologia breve', in Suplemento Faz do no. 433, 7 March, Lisbon 1992, pp. iv-vi
Guy Weelen & Jean-François Jaeger, Vieira da Silva, Vol. I: Catalogue Raisonné, Geneva 1994, p. 73, no. 348, illustrated; Vol. II, Monographie, p. 171, illustrated in colour 

Painted in exile in Rio de Janeiro during the Second World War, this beautiful rendering of her home-town of Lisbon anticipates and lays the seeds for Vieira da Silva’s mature style. One of her most important works on paper, this composition of repeated squares, rectangles and vertical lines painted over type-written characters combines a figurative evocation of a city with a machinist and abstract aesthetic. Using extremly advanced abstract sensitivities and techniques, Vieira da Silva achieves shifts back and forth within the pictorial space and the whole scene seems to shimmer as if under the heat of the sun.

 

Fleeing Paris at the outbreak of the War, Vieira da Silva returned to Lisbon in 1939 in an attempt to regain her Portuguese citizenship which she had lost upon her marriage to the Hungarian-Jewish painter Arpad Szenes. Told she would only be given Portuguese papers if she divorced Szenes, the two artists decided to move to Brazil in June 1940. In exile, Lisbon became a recurrent subject of her paintings in an attempt to assuage her homesickness. Painted with a palette of cool blues, Lisbonne Bleue is a calming, consoling image. By granting us the view she does and abandoning traditional perspective without any resulting disjointedness in the overall composition, Vieira da Silva creates a magical place that seems to encourage us to fly in and inhabit whichever quarter takes our fancy. Lisbon becomes not so much the capital of a right-wing dictatorship in a war-ravaged Europe as a mirage, a dream city.

 

It was this ability to transform the big city into something graceful and poetic that first shot Vieira da Silva to fame upon her return to Europe in 1947. Her pictures increasingly saw the stylistic union of spatial perspective with the stream-lined, machinist cubism she had imbued from Léger in Paris before the War, a conjunction that is demonstrated for the first time in the present work. Asked what was the starting point of her pictures Vieira da Silva once replied, “Frequently, one of my old pictures that I would like to paint again.” (Gisela Rosenthal, Vieira da Silva, Cologne 1998, p. 54). Nowhere is this more amply demonstrated than in Lisbonne Bleue.