Art: Painter of Space

For the past ten years, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, 53, has not only been the leading woman painter of the School of Paris, but also has surpassed many of the men. Some critics have called her a “lyric expressionist,” others an “abstract landscapist”; perhaps she is both and more. “With present techniques, an architect can build whatever he wants to,” she says. “Why shouldn’t I be able to build what I like in a painting?” Painter Vieira da Silva builds intricate constructions that never say, but only hint at what they are.

Thirty years ago, while visiting Marseille, Vieira da Silva saw the famous Pont Transbordeur. “It no longer exists,” she says, “and I would not know exactly how to describe it without my brushes.” Nevertheless she remembers seeing in it not just a bridge but space chopped and linked up by an extraordinarily beautiful network of lines. This simultaneous chopping and linking has been the dominant theme in her work ever since. At one time she built up her paintings almost entirely of small squares. Later the squares opened into lines that could be manipulated into an infinite number of arrangements. Vieira da Silva begins a work with no image in mind: the painting starts out as a “skeleton”—a few lines or points or cells—and then leads the artist on. “I always have a line to add or a void to fill,” she says.

In the ’40s she used a bold palette, delighting in the clash of colors. Gradually, the palette cooled into chilly blues and greys, then faded almost to white. Only recently has the color begun to seep back again.

Tutors & Masters. The daughter of a Portuguese economist who died when she was two, Maria Vieira da Silva was raised by her mother and an uncle, who provided her with a string of tutors and encouraged her to become an artist. “They were like children who had a doll that could be taught tricks,” she remembers. She began studying drawing and painting in earnest at the age of eleven, took up sculpture at 16, moved to Paris at 19. There she studied under masters: Sculptor Emile Antoine Bourdelle, Painter Fernand Léger, Engraver Stanley Hayter.

A handsome woman with darting brown eyes, she lives quietly in a comfortable Paris house with her Hungarian-born husband, Painter Arpad Szenès. She may do as few as ten paintings a year, but she works almost compulsively from dawn to midnight. Asked why, she simply shrugs. “One must.” She is extraordinarily shy. even in middle age; the story goes that when a delegation of women admirers called on her one day, she fled to a closet and hid there until they went away. Not true, says Vieira da Silva: “If there had been a closet, I would have hidden in it. Instead there was a dirty corridor full of junk, and I lay down there on the floor.”

Crisscross & Patchwork. “For me,” she says, “the art of painting is an adventure. When I paint a landscape or a seascape. I’m not very sure it’s a landscape or a seascape. It’s a thought form rather than a realistic form.” This vagueness makes a Vieira da Silva painting something of an adventure for the viewer as well. He may see a distant city, a clump of ruins. a suggestion of a bridge, a wispy shoreline, or just a shredded bit of grill. But whatever he sees may not be there for long. When at her best, Vieira da Silva can tease the eye unmercifully: it no sooner comes to rest than it is swept along another line, is caught up in another crisscross, drops into another patchwork, crashes into some delicate grating, is sucked up again into a screen of mist. The lines do not define space; they create it. And in a good Vieira da Silva painting, the space can be infinite.