Background
Mrs. Vieira da Silva was born in Lisbon, Portugal, on June 13, 1908. She became familiar with art at a very early age thanks to her grandfather, Sebastião de Magalhães Lima, founder of the journal O Século in Lisbon.
Helena Vieira da Silva with Arpad Szenes.
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva painting Memoire.
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva with her work.
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, 1960.
Vieira da Silva, Paris, 1986.
Vieira da Silva, Paris, 1949.
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva in 1960.
Mrs. Vieira da Silva was born in Lisbon, Portugal, on June 13, 1908. She became familiar with art at a very early age thanks to her grandfather, Sebastião de Magalhães Lima, founder of the journal O Século in Lisbon.
At the age of eleven Maria Vieira da Silva began seriously studying drawing and painting at Academia de Belas-Artes. In her teen years she studied painting with Fernand Léger, sculpture with Antoine Bourdelle, and engraving with Stanley William Hayter, all masters in their respective fields. She also created textile designs. In 1928 Vieira da Silva left Lisbon to study sculpture in Paris, but decided in 1929 to focus on painting.
By 1930 Vieira da Silva was exhibiting her paintings in Paris. In the 1930s Vieira da Silva began producing her characteristic works which were heavily impastoed, and overlaid with a complex arrangement of small rectangles. After a brief sojourn back in Lisbon and a period spent in Brazil during World War II (1940-1947), Vieira da Silva lived and worked in Paris the rest of her life. In 1943, Maria Vieira da Silva exhibited in Peggy Guggenheim's show Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century gallery in New York. Her work is related to French Tachisme, American Abstract expressionism, and Surrealism - as were many of her contemporaries who were painting in Post-War Paris during the mid to late 1940s and early 1950s. She adopted French citizenship in 1956.
Few artists have had, in the course of the last century, a destiny as intimately linked to a gallery as that which Mrs. Vieira da Silva knew with the Jeanne Bucher Jaeger Gallery. After the publication of the edition Kô et Kô in 1933, she was exhibited by Jeanne Bucher at the end of every decade and would remain, apart from an episode of some dozen years at Pierre Loeb during the 1950s, constantly promoted and supported in France and abroad by Jean-François Jaeger beginning in 1960, and then by Veronique Jaeger since 2004.
After the passing of her husband, the artist Árpád Szenes, in 1985, her drawing style turned towards a brightening and the phenomena of brief disappearances followed by resurgences; her scratches notched the material as if to bring to the surface all of ancient history, that is to say that of the genesis of the work.
Villa des Camélias
La recólte
Untitled
Danse
Untitled
O Naufrágio
Composition
Still Life Blue
Cedar
Enigma
Sofá harpa
Dislocation du labyrinthe
Untitled
Le theatre PIrandello
Venice
Interieur à la spirale
Blanche
Untitled
Kô & Kô
La rue
L'invasion
Maisons
Self Portrait
Untitled
Ariane
A Partida de Xadrez
Untitled
Passage of the Mirrors
Bibliothèque
Ripolin. The tree prisoner
Liberté
Untitled
The Corridor
Paris
The Tiled Room
The Town
Le Village
Structure Dynamique
Communal
Gris Corot
Quotes from others about the person
René Char: "Vieira da Silva holds closed in her hand, among so many slack hands, without closure, without lacing, without need, something that is at once the light of a sun and the promise of a seed. Her sense of the labyrinth, her magic of edges, invite a return to sheltering mountains as well as an enlargement in the order of the city, seat of power."
In 1930, Mrs. Vieira da Silva married the Hungarian painter Árpád Szenes.