Portuguese Artist Maria Helena Vieira da Silva Is Back in the Spotlight
- @ Cynthia Adina Kirkwood
- 10 hours ago
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L'Exode (The Exodus) ( fabric and paper, color screen printing) (1968) (@ Maria Helena Vieira da Silva)
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva revolutionized the way of representing space on canvas. Drawn from memory and imagination, her works evoke urban landscapes and interior architectural spaces. She merged abstraction and figuration, blurring the boundaries between reality and ideas, according to Guggenheim Bilbao.
"During her lifetime, Vieira da Silva (1908-1992) exhibited and sold a great deal. After her death, she continued to be recognized in Portugal and France but, outside the countries which were her home, she was seen less and less," said Flavia Frigeri, who curated a retrospective of the artist's work now at the Guggenheim Bilbao, according to Expresso (October 30).
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space showcases 70 works, tracing the artist's investigation of space and perception, between lines and labyrinths, dissolving architecture and fragmented perspectives. It is scheduled to be at the Spanish museum until February 22, 2026.
"Composition (screen, oil) (1936) is part of a set defined as spatial frameworks which serve to highlight the structures that define the composition, where abstraction excludes any figuration. Vieira da Silva's attention is held by the framework of the visible, and the structures are stripped away. It is the essence which interests her: the spaces are interior, closed, just as the artist is isolated from the outside world and reality," according to Marina Bairrão Ruivo, in Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian (May 2010).
(@ Maria Helena Vieira da Silva)
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva was born in Lisbon on June 13, 1908, She spent the first couple of years of her life in Switzerland, where her father served as the ambassador. Sadly, her father died of an illness when she was only two years old, and she returned to Lisbon with her mother.
From then on, she was brought up in the family of her mother, whose father, José Silva Graça, a republican, was the founder of the major daily newspaper, O Século, and its weekly magazine, Ilustração Portuguesa, according to Mayoral galleries. In 1931, their home, the Silva Graça palacete (little palace), was converted into a luxury hotel, the Hotel Aviz, where Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian, the Armenian millionaire and patron to Portugal, lived for 13 years until his death in 1955.
Gulbenkian bequeathed his artistic treasures to Portugal. Coincidentally, the Gulbenkian Center of Modern Art owns a large collection of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva's works.
At the end of the summer of 1913, when Vieira da Silva was only five, after a two-month stay in England marked by visits to museums and Shakespearean theater, she recalled deciding to become a painter, according to Marina Bairrão Ruivo, Camões Instituto da Cooperação e da Lingua.
"After studying drawing, painting and sculpture in Lisbon, she went to Paris in 1928, dissatisfied with the teaching at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, during a politically unstable period in the face of the rise of fascism and a culturally unstimulating atmosphere."
At the time, Paris was the beating heart of the modern art world, according to Guggenheim Bilbao. Lisbon's native daughter attended academies, studied painting and experimented with sculpture. It was in Paris that she met the painter Arpad Szenes (1897-1985) with whom she soon developed an emotional and creative bond which would last their whole lives.
Diplomat's Daughter Becomes Stateless
In 1930, she married the Hungarian Jewish painter, gaining citizenship to the Kingdom of Hungary and losing her Portuguese nationality, according to Marina Bairrão Ruivo, Camões Instituto da Cooperação e da Lingua. At that time, the law stipulated that a Portuguese woman who acquired the nationality of her husband, unless she declared otherwise, would lose her Portuguese nationality, according to the Report on Citizenship Law: Portugal (2012), European University Institute. The general consensus, reflected in the Hague Convention of 1930 and the Portuguese Nationality Law, was against dual nationality, which was viewed as a conflict of loyalties.
But then, Arpad Szenes lost his Hungarian nationality, and the couple became stateless. The reason for his loss of citizenship is not clear. Wagner & Wagner Law Firm Budapest explains:
"During the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, large waves of Hungarian citizens emigrated abroad, and many lost their Hungarian citizenship -- sometimes without even being aware of it. But what legal grounds could have led to the deprivation of citizenship during the decades surrounding World War II?
"In the 1930s, Act L of 1879 was still in force in Hungary. According to this law, the Minister of the Interior could declare the loss of Hungarian citizenship by an administrative decision if a citizen entered the service of a foreign state and failed to return home upon request.
"All this is highly significant because many individuals left Hungary in the 1930s to escape Nazi persecution or due to socialist convictions."
In various European countries, during the late 1930s, procedures for the revocation of nationality intensified toward certain groups, and were implicitly or explicitly based on ethnic-religious -- and especially anti-Semitic. Prewar laws on nationality prepared the persecution of Jews, according to The revocation of nationality (First half of the twentieth century) (September 14, 2023), Encyclopédie d´histoire numérique de l'Europe.
Vieira da Silva Leaves for Lisbon
In 1939, pressured by circumstances, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva left Paris for Lisbon, according to Guggenheim Bilbao. She appealed to the government of dictator António de Oliveira Salazar to regain her Portuguese nationality and also have it granted to her husband. She was unsuccessful.
In 1940, she and Arpad left for Brazil, where they lived until 1947.
The couple settled at the Pensão Internacional in Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro Municipality, which became a center for the cultural exchange of ideas. Vieira da Silva mingled with intellectuals and other artists, such as the Brazilian writers Cecília Meireles and Murilo Mendes.
In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim included her in an exhibition by 31 women, held in New York, while in 1937, Hilla von Rebay, the first director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, purchased one of her works, which is still in the holdings of the museum. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection hosted the retrospective Maria Elena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space from April to September.
Tragic Maritime Story or Shipwreck (1944) (screen, oil) (@ Maria Helena Vieira da Silva)
Far from Europe during World War II, Vieira da Silva created some of her most intense works, depicting a world suspended between tragedy and resistance.
La Ville (The City) (1950-51) (oil on canvas) (@ Maria Helena Vieira da Silva)
Back in Paris after seven years, she was by then an internationally acclaimed artist. Her style incorporated several influences: Portuguese azulejos (tiles), Pierre Bonnard's checkered tablecloths, and Cubist and Futurist abstraction, according to Guggenheim Bilbao. Her paintings are like maps of imaginary cities seen from above or spaces of the mind. Grids, lines, shattered perspectives. Her paintings don't depict a scene. They draw us into a scene.
In 1952, she again requested reacquiring Portuguese nationality from the Salazar government and was unsuccessful again. In 1956, the couple were granted French nationality.
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva remained busy artistically. She made her debut in set design; produced works in lithography, serigraphy, stained glass, tiles and tapestry, and illustrated several literary publications.
She held numerous solo exhibitions in Paris, Lille, Lausanne, Tours, Stockholm, Lisbon, Porto, New York, Darmstadt, Geneva, London, Basel and Washington, D.C. She also was in in many group exhibitions, and she participated in many international competitions in which she won prizes, including the International Painting Prize at the São Paulo Biennial (1961).
The artist received successive official decorations from France: Chevalier and Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1960 and 1962) and the Grand Prix National des Arts (1966), according to the Gulbenkian Modern Art Museum.
Retrospectives of her work multiplied throughout Europe (Hanover, Bremen, Wuppertal, in 1958; Mannheim, in 1962; Grenoble, Turin, in 1964, and Paris, Oslo, Basel, Lisbon, at the Gulbenkian, in 1971.
She received numerous invitations; her first tapestry by the prestigious Manufacture de Beauvais (1965); stained glass windows in the church of Saint-Jacques in Reims (1966); poster designs for the April 25, 1974 Portuguese revolution, published by the Gulbenkian Foundation (1975), and for the UNESCO Year of Peace (1986).
Three years after the overthrow of nearly 50 years of an authoritarian government, revolution, the Portuguese government awarded her the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint James of the Sword (1977). The Lisbon Metro commissioned her to decorate the Cidade Universitária station, where she was assisted by the painter and ceramicist Manuel Cargaleiro (1988).
Tiles at the Cidade Universitária Metro station in Lisbon by Maria Helena Vieira da Silva
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva kept at work in her Paris studio to the end of her husband's life in 1985 and toward the end of hers in 1992.
She was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London (1988) and an Officer of the Legion of Honor (1991), according to the Gulbenkian Modern Art Museum. The Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation was created in Lisbon (1990).
Besides inclusion in major national collections, her work is found in the world's most prominent museums, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum (New York), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Tate Collection (London), Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid), Art Institute of Chicago, Ashmolean Museum (Oxford) and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space features works from various museums and private collections at the Guggenheim Bilbao until February 22, 2026.
This portrait reminds us of Almada Negreiros. "It is from this Lisbon moment (1935-36), a period of intense artistic interaction in which the names of Almada, Vieira and Szenes intersect," according to Encontro de Artistas: Almada Negreiros, Vieira da Silva e Arpad Szenes, Modern!smo: Arquivo da Geração de Orpheu. The couple were in Lisbon from time to time, showing their work and cultivating friendships. Near the end of a 16-month stay, they joined Negreiros and other artists as part of the Exhibition of Independent Modern Artists at Casa Quintão, Chiado, Lisbon, June 15-30, 1936.
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