Maria Helena and Arpad

In 1928 Maria Helena Vieira da Silva moved from Lisbon to Paris to pursue her art studies. She enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière—an art school devoted to painting and sculpture free from academic restrictions and predicated on a more open approach to art teaching and learning. There Vieira da Silva met the Hungarian painter Arpad Szenes. The two locked eyes on her arrival at the art school, but only properly made each other’s acquaintance two years later, and married shortly thereafter. The relationship between Vieira da Silva and Szenes was a happy one, and the couple stayed together until Szenes’s death in 1985. Szenes respected Vieira da Silva’s total devotion to painting and celebrated it in the many portraits he made of her at work, such as Portrait of Maria Helena (1940) exhibited here. “It’s all very mysterious. Our life has been marvelous. Everyone’s amazed! Two painters who love each other and have spent their lives together,” was how Vieira da Silva described their intimate partnership.