Cities: Real and imagined

“I am a woman of the city,” Vieira da Silva stated with conviction. Indeed, she was a city-dweller: Lisbon, Paris, Rio de Janeiro variously shaped her understanding of what a city looked like and what it meant to inhabit it. Stemming perhaps from the collective need to rebuild in the aftermath of World War II’s destruction, Vieira da Silva turned the “city” into a subject of visual study. In her paintings she explored cities that were well known to her, such as Paris, as well as ones that she had only ever visited with her imagination. A festival of blues characterizes her view of Venice in Venetian Celebration (1949) while Paris (1951) subjects the city to intersecting lines suggestive of a hurried movement. The French capital is also the protagonist in Paris at Night (1951)—a nocturnal take on the city of lights, a reference present also in The Night City or The Lights of the City (1950). Whereas The Tentacular City (1954) and Characters in the Street (1948) speak to the humdrum of city-dwelling, referring to all cities rather than to one in particular. Vieira da Silva’s cities are tangible as much as they are a flight of the imagination, as The City of Gyroplanes (1954) suggests. Collectively, this body of work marks the artist’s definitive shift towards abstraction.