Throughout her life, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva lived in Lisbon, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Yèvre-le-Châtel. In Lisbon, the house off Praça das Amoreiras (now part of The Arpad Szenes – Vieira da Silva Foundation) doubled up as home-studio. The bareness of the interior influenced one of her earliest, most important works, Studio, Lisbon (1934–35), included in this exhibition. The stripped-down aesthetic of that room allowed the artist to concentrate on the organic structure, or “anatomy”, of the space, a recurrent motif in her oeuvre.

In 1928, Vieira da Silva left Lisbon for Paris to study art at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière—a liberal art school free from academic restrictions. There she met Hungarian artist Arpad Szenes (b. 1897; d. 1985); they married in 1930 and took up residence at the Villa des Camélias in Paris. Originally meant as a home-studio for both artists, the place was not spacious enough for both and in 1938 Szenes rented a studio in Boulevard Saint-Jacques. Shortly thereafter Vieira da Silva joined him. With its large windows and high ceilings, that studio was particularly conducive to Vieira da Silva’s ongoing study of space.

With the outbreak of World War II, the couple left Paris for Lisbon first and then Rio de Janeiro. While they were gone, they entrusted the care of their studio in Boulevard Saint-Jacques and its contents to gallerist Jeanne Bucher. Despite the heat that troubled Vieira da Silva and the anxiety due to the atrocities being perpetrated in Europe, in Brazil she produced some of her most extraordinary paintings, where she offered striking representations of humanity in the throes of tragedy.

Upon her return to Paris in 1947, Vieira da Silva reclaimed her studio in Boulevard Saint-Jacques. Real and imaginary urban landscapes are a strong influence on her post-war paintings, where the view onto the city of Paris from the window of the Hôtel des Terrasses, where they took up residence in 1953, was a source of inspiration for her newfound pictorial interest in cities.

In 1956 Vieira da Silva and Szenes moved to 34 rue de l’Abbé-Carton in Paris, a homestudio built for them by architect Georges Johannet. The color photo mural in this gallery reproduces Vieira da Silva’s studio, a space that served her needs and where she was happy.

In 1960 the need for a space away from the frantic pace of city life led the couple to buy a house at Yèvre-le Châtel, in the Loire region, where they spent all their summers from then on. That home-studio, like all of Vieira da Silva’s, was a place for art making, but also for thinking. With its open plan and exposed wooden beams, it inspired numerous works, where the anatomy of space is rendered through abstract forms.

 

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva in the Studio, Rio de Janeiro, 1942. Carlos Moskovics Collection, Instituto Moreira Salles