Contributed by David Carrier / Thanks to remarkably cultivated parents, Lisbon-born Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908–1992) was exposed to a lot of important art from early on. When she was just five, she saw the work of Paolo Uccello, a clear influence, in London’s National Gallery. Moving to France in 1928, Vieiro da Silva showed in Paris in the late 1920s and 1930s, took refuge from the German occupation during World War II in Brazil (her husband, Arpad Szenes, was a Hungarian Jew), and after the war returned to Paris, where she had a successful career. The expertly installed exhibition currently at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice aims to bring her art to the attention of contemporary audiences.
Nearly always, da Silva employs a finely woven grid. While she was very much an artist of twentieth-century industrial culture – The Street and The Evening depict machinery – her gridded spaces also reach back to the perspectival constructions of Uccello and other early Renaissance painters. They are not the modern grids of, say, Al Held or Sol Lewitt. And her colors are not Mondrian’s pure reds, blues, and blacks, but rather earthy impure browns and yellows. That said, her swirling patterns sometimes resemble Julie Mehretu’s, though on a smaller scale.
Vieira da Silva’s most daring works are her earliest paintings, from the 1930s and 1940s. Composition’s interlocking forms compose an irregularly shaped container, encircled by red and yellow lines that hold them in a deep space. In The Heavens, winding white tubes undergird a grey expanse. In The Hero or The Herald, a narrow black grid morphs into a blue container. As war took hold, she occasionally depicted human figures. The Disaster, Shipwreck, and Tragic Maritime Story show people crowded together, as if the weight of events had forced her to temporarily abandon abstraction. In Chess Players and Red Chess Board, she generated the respective players and implement from cubist-style planes. Chessboard later continued that motif, but without a human presence. Her heavily constructed grids can seem protective, as in Construction Site and Equity, which like several of her later works employs a beautiful pale white. In Silence, made between 1984 and 1988, majestic pale black lines mark the conclusion to a long, brilliant career.
The show raises intriguing questions. Precisely what drove Vieira da Silva’s insertion of figures into her wartime pictures? What’s with the hidden figures in Rio Carnival and the cards in the postwar painting The Card Players? More broadly, why did such an accomplished figurative artist choose to confine her work largely to abstraction? Although the catalogue provides an abundant account of Vieira da Silva’s life – she was, it seems, the rare female modernist whose husband generously supported her endeavors – it says relatively little about her stylistic development or the sources of her art. I look forward to learning more about this gifted painter. By virtue of her long career and the quality of her best work, she seems a major figure.
“Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space,” Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni Dorsoduro 701, Venice, Italy. Through September 15, 2025. The show travels to Guggenheim Bilbao.
About the author: David Carrier is a former professor at Carnegie Mellon University; Getty Scholar; and Clark Fellow. He has published art criticism in Apollo, artcritical, Artforum, Artus, and Burlington Magazine, and has been a guest editor for The Brooklyn Rail. He is a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.
