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The Guggenheim Museum in Venice is presenting, until mid-September, a ma-
gnificent retrospective dedicated to the Portuguese artist Maria Helena Vieira da Silva
(Lisbon 1980 - Paris 1992).
A major figure in 20th-century abstract art, she is deeply linked to the history and
legacy of Peggy and Solomon R. Guggenheim.
Indeed, in 1943, she was among the 31 artists invited to the exhibition «Exhibition
by 31 Women» organized by Peggy at the New York gallery Art of This Century. Hilla
Rebay, the first Director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1937, also pur-
chased one of her very first paintings and became one of her patrons. Born in Lisbon
to a bourgeois family, she decided to move to Paris at the age of 20, where she met her
future husband, Arpad Szenes, a painter of Hungarian origin.
Naturally French, she lived her entire life in Paris, except during the Second World
War, when she moved to Rio de Janeiro for six years.
In Paris, she enrolled in Bourdelle’s sculpture class at the Académie de la Grande
Chaumière and exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Artistes Français.
The Museum presents more than 70 works from the most important museums and
galleries around the world. This exhibition offers a unique perspective on the evolu-
tion of the artist’s visual language from the 1930s to the late 1980s.
Through a universe of silence and light, she develops a graphic architecture composed
of structures, labyrinths, and chromatic rhythms.
Her unique style is characterized by movement and constant transformation.
The exhibition begins with a depiction of her romantic relationship, whose happiness
would only end with her husband’s death in 1985. Szenes respected his wife’s work,
her devotion to art, her patience, and her slow rhythms.
He celebrated her in numerous portraits.
Their studio-workshop is presented under the evocative title «Anatomy of a Space.»