Maria Helena Vieira Da Silva, obscure modernist, for a moment

Suitably, a major survey was conducted on the maze-like abstract abstract of the Portuguese French artist Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908–92), a city of Venice, an unexpectedly trapped in the square. In these paintings, the planes of vibrant tiles of squares intersect and stretch, while the scaffolding of intertwined lines floated over its own dimensions. They revealed hidden openings and gaps and deepened the meaning of increasingly staring at them.

These works of art have been in obscurity for a moment. They are the main attraction of the large-scale travel exhibitions held in Marseille and Dijon between 2022 and 2023, and they were unveiled at the 2021 “Women’s Abstraction” exhibition in the centre of Pompidou, which restored Vieira da Silva on radar for the general public. That momentum is likely to only grow from here: her Venetian survey, in the September 15 Peggy Guggenheim collection, next to the Spanish Guggenheim Bilbao.

Unlike most female artists of her generation, Vieira da Silva is the star of her day. She was included in the historic “31 Women’s Exhibition” in 1943, in the art gallery of this century by Peggy Guggenheim in New York, and by the mid-1950s she showed her work twice at the Venice Biennale and brought her work to cities with Rio de Janeiro and Rio de Janeiro and Rio de Janeiro and Stockholm. She and her husband, Hungarian-Jewish artist Arpad Szenes formed a celebrity couple who dated Paris’ avant-garde creators who lived, studied and lived in the late 1920s and 1930s and after World War II. (Vieira da Silva is more acclaimed and more successful than Szenes, which is the rarity of her day.) Georges Braque personally encouraged Vieira Da Silva to continue working, while Fernand Léger taught her in 1929 when she was in Académie Moderne in Paris, where she learned carving in 1929. Giacometti.

Vieira da Silva is now the new fascinating theme because she “unnecessarily fits into any category but then introduces a wider range of themes that are very convincing with our moments now,” said Guggenheim curator Flavia Frigeri, who was recently appointed curator and director of collections at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Specifically, Frigeri points to the artist’s description of World War II – a human tragedy. In these symbolic works, people of unknown origin or politics are swept into chaos, violent turmoil that they neither control nor escape. Their bodies are presented in simplified, often angled and flat strokes, blending with the surrounding Cubist landscape. An unforgettable painting is called disaster (1942).

Frigley said the works are works that “explain why we rediscover her, or why I think it’s important to rediscover her.” ”

The artist’s practice also sparked the curiosity of a younger generation unfamiliar with his work, partly because it seems to escape traditional classification. “We can’t find any direct connection between artists and any art movement,” said Naïs Lefrancois, curator of Beaux-Arts de Dijon, who co-organized the 2022 Vieira Da Silva exhibition. The artist had previously had links to the art information movement in the 1940s and 1950s, but Lefrancois said the connection did not end completely. “She insisted not to be part of the team, she wanted to keep her freedom. She didn’t want to be classified and classified,” Lefrancois explained.

Her interest in Vieira da Silva’s paintings was also very elusive when she first saw them at Tate Modern Modern. “I can’t put her on her,” Frigley said.

Véronique Jaeger’s great-grandmother was the first to give Vieira Da Silva a solo exhibition, and his eponymous Jeanne Bucher Jaeger Gallery represented artists throughout his life, saying the world is ready for artists like this. “We’ve always been in a situation where we can go along one road or another, all of these views exist in her paintings – all of these mazes, all of these mazes, the space does not stop progressing, stretching, stretching, and that’s almost her vision,” “There’s always an opening. Even in our impression, it’s closed, there’s an exit.”

Vieira da Silva himself is open to all kinds of artistic styles. She is interested in Futurism, Cubism, medieval murals and Spanish-Arab geometric shapes Azulejo Ceramic tiles, which can be found throughout Lisbon, were born and raised by mothers and grandparents. She traveled in Europe with her family, watched art, and was supported by her creative ambitions. Because her grandfather runs a newspaper, she was able to keep up with cultural events, thus enhancing her interest in modernism.

She also draws a lot of space, which seems to break down, merge and grow. She once said, “My latest paintings often have the shape of what others consider to be a house, but for me it’s an interior with doors and windows, not the perfect room, but the entrance.” “The doors are a very important element to me. Now for a long time now, I feel like I’m standing in front of a closed door, and I don’t know or know what’s necessary to happen on the other side.

But it took some time to develop those spaces for change. Her Peggy Guggenheim series was heavy on the works she did in the 1930s, 40s and 50s and noted the influence of her early sculptural and human anatomy studies as a starting point for Vieira da Silva’s abstraction, and a means of expressing her interest in real space. The artist studied anatomy in the 1920s in the fine art program of Escola de Belas Artes in Lisbon and is well known to have sketches in the famous sack of bones. “She goes from the inside of her body to space,” Jaeger said, adding that the artist’s paintings are very slow. “She is kind of like a rope walker, walking along a line and exploring the space as she slowly draws. There is a lot of silence. She says very little, but she rarely lives everything around her.”

Vieira da Silva is the only child born in a wealthy family in Lisbon and tutored for an hour at home and spent hours alone, screening the family library, which includes art about the past and books she now. She once said, “In the world of sound, I take refuge in the world of color. I believe that all these effects are merged into one entity of myself.” At one time, when she was a child, she was lost in a maze, which proved to be an unforgettable experience. The maze-like form later appeared in her paintings as a metaphor for life and suggests how we experience the passage of time.

After his painting and painting studies at Escola de Belas Artes in 1928, Vieira da Silva moved to Paris at the age of 19 to continue his training at the Académiede de la Grande Chaumière. There, she met Szenes, married two years later, and has been with her death in 1985. Eventually, she was exposed to the works of Picasso, Matisse, Bornard and Cezanne, which led her to form her own artistic language in the following years.

The critical moment of Vieira da Silva’s early artistic experiments took place shortly after her arrival in France. In the old port of Marseille, her transport bridge was impressed despite its huge size. This aspect “influenced her view of space as a fluid and unrestricted form.” She pushed further in the following years and produced a work titled Title in 1935 la chambre a carreaux [The Tiled Room]. This color perspective of the internally twisted board board is largely inspired by music, which is an early breakthrough.

In 1940, with the wanderings of World War II Europe, Vieira da Silva and Szenes moved to Rio de Janeiro for a year, where she began working as a character, drawing her horror expressions at global events. The couple eventually returned to Paris in 1947. The works made in the post-war period draw inspiration from the interior and exterior of the cityscape and architecture and show her further towards abstraction.

Judging from the appearance of the Venice show, Vieira da Silva tried her hand, in various formal experiments between the 30s and 50s, and then seemed to fall into a more repetitive pattern in the following years. However, based on what is here, it is also surprising to consider whether her work is more influential than most people realize. Jagger said Louise Bourgeois described Vieira da Silva as an inspiration to compare the work of the latter artist with the paintings of Julie Mehretu, who also abstracts the architectural space.

The dealer said the comparison did not hurt what Jaeger said was a strong market interest in Vieira Da Silva’s works, which sold up to $900,000 in paintings. And, as Lefrancois points out, the female artists of Vieira Da Silva’s generation are becoming increasingly fascinated.

The performance of Guggenheim certainly made Vieira da Silva’s art strange and thrilled. What is particularly noteworthy is her 1952 painting Terrasse Ensoleillée [Sunny Terrace]. This golden canvas was made in a web-like yellow square when Paris returned to Paris. The pattern looks a bit like spots of sunlight, but it also means the order crash. Like her broader practice, the painting hints at another world-the eyes must learn to see in new ways.