World War II: A view from Rio de Janeiro

“When the war was declared we were afraid of staying in France… I was panic-stricken, imagining that Arpad would be arrested.” These words express Vieira da Silva’s anxiety at the outbreak of World War II, driven by her fear that Szenes’s Jewish heritage would lead to his persecution. Hence, the couple left Paris in 1939 and moved to Lisbon, where they hoped that his conversion to Catholicism and her attempts to reclaim Portuguese citizenship (lost by marrying Szenes in 1930) would protect them. This was not the case and in June 1940 they set sail for Rio de Janeiro. Vieira da Silva found it hard to settle in Brazil, but the paintings she made during her time in Rio de Janeiro are amongst the most striking of her entire oeuvre. Except for The Drowned, painted in 1938, which prefigures the arrival of dark times, and Rio Carnival (1944), which is infused with the joy and ebullience of the local festivity, all the others represent humanity in the throes of tragedy. Her response to the news from Europe also conveys her own suffering, experienced at a distance yet physically tangible. Living, drowning, weeping, attacking and being attacked, Vieira da Silva’s figures fight for a survival that feels increasingly out of reach.