Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, the Painter of Labyrinths
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This week, I'm taking you to meet an artist who did my journey in reverse. I'm French and I chose Portugal; she was Portuguese and chose France.
Her name is Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, and her paintings are true labyrinths you could get lost in for hours.
A girl from Lisbon in Paris
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva was born in Lisbon on 13 June 1908. From a very young age, she was drawn to painting, drawing and music. At eleven, she was already studying drawing and painting in Lisbon.
In 1928, she moved to Paris to continue her artistic training. She began with sculpture, under Antoine Bourdelle, then turned to painting and attended classes with Fernand Léger, among others.
In 1930, she married the Hungarian painter Árpád Szenes, whom she had met in Paris. Their lives and their work as artists would remain deeply connected, through creation, travels and exile.
Exile, then recognition
During the Second World War, the couple left Paris and took refuge first in Portugal, then in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, where they lived from 1940 to 1947.
Back in Paris after the war, Vieira da Silva continued her work and gradually asserted her own pictorial language. She became a French citizen in 1956.
In 1966, she became the first woman to receive the Grand Prix national des Arts in France. A major recognition for an artist who had built a world entirely her own.
Cities, libraries and labyrinths
Her paintings are made of small squares, lines, crossings and perspectives that open and close. You can make out cities, shelves of books, railway stations, staircases, grids. Sometimes they even bring to mind the azulejos of Lisbon.
It is abstract, and yet you feel you could walk through it. Your eye moves forward, gets lost, goes back. The lines seem to build a space, then take it apart again.
That's what I love in her painting: this feeling of depth, movement and mystery. You don't simply look at a painting, you step into it.
In Lisbon, you can discover her world at the Árpád Szenes – Vieira da Silva Foundation museum, dedicated to the work of the couple. It is housed in a former silk factory, on the lovely Amoreiras square, right next to the garden of the same name.
And if you take the metro, stop at Cidade Universitária. There you will see a large azulejo panel called Le Métro, made by Manuel Cargaleiro from a 1940 gouache by Vieira da Silva. A lovely meeting between two artists.
Why she speaks to me
Because she shows that you can keep your country in your heart while building your life somewhere else. Her path touches me deeply: she was Portuguese and found her place in France, while I left France to settle in Portugal.
And then there are her paintings. When I look at her little squares of colour, her lines and her almost geometric constructions, I can't help thinking of Lisbon.
That's also what connects her to my painting Kaleidoscope Lisboa, inspired by this city I love and keep discovering, with its colours, its patterns and its perspectives.
If you enjoy discovering artists, you might also like my articles about Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Sonia and Robert Delaunay.
And you?
Have you ever seen a Vieira da Silva painting in real life? Tell me on WhatsApp. I'd love to know which one stayed with you.
In colour,
Lenon B
Contemporary painter, Ericeira, Portugal