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Lot Essay
‘Nearly always, da Silva employs a finely woven grid. While she was very much an artist of twentieth-century industrial culture ... 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 colours 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’ (David Carrier)
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s Rouge indien (Indian Red Earth) (1967) is a mesmeric tessellation of colour. Vivid red streaks bejewelled with fine strips of blue, yellow, green, grey and purple weave together in an intricate chromatic tapestry. They are set within broad-brushed banks of white, creating create the effect of a wintry landscape, or its reflection, partially obscured by vast fields of snow. Without a vanishing point, the viewer’s eye roves over a mysterious terrain in which foreground and background, sky and earth, merge together into one. The painting bears illustrious provenance. First owned by the noted Modernist dealer Theodore Schempp, it was later acquired by Robert and Traude Hensel, whose collection included works by Sonia Delaunay, Serge Poliakoff, and Man Ray, among others. Subsequently, Rouge indien (Indian Red Earth) resided in The Indianapolis Museum of Art for almost three decades.
Born in Lisbon in 1908, Vieira da Silva studied painting at the city’s Escola de Belas-Artes before moving to Paris in 1928 to continue her training at the prestigious Académie de la Grande Chaumière, whose alumni include Joan Miró, Tamara de Lempicka, and Louise Bourgeois. Intrigued by the destabilisation of depth and perspective in Cubist and Futurist painting, her idiom grew increasingly abstract as she sought new ways to represent the world. As Dina Vierny observes, her compositions would go on to collapse boundaries, offering instead both ‘a vision of infinity and an imagined reality … where sensation and thought, order and chaos [all are able to] operate’ (D. Vierny, ‘Preface’, in Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, exh. cat. Musée Maillol, Paris, 1999, p. 9).
Following seven years of exile in Rio de Janeiro with her husband, the Hungarian Jewish painter Árpád Szenes, Vieira da Silva returned to Paris in 1947. She became a central figure in the Art Informel scene alongside other international artists including Jean-Paul Riopelle and Zao Wou-Ki. Like her, these painters were forging new visual languages to take the measure of an era of movement, uncertainty and change. With chequered colour and plunging perspectives, Vieira da Silva’s paintings became decentred mazes or hypnotic mosaics of colour, infused with the disoriented spirit of the age. Her stature grew rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century, and the present work dates from a high point in her critical and commercial success. The 1960s were marked by individual and collective exhibitions throughout the world: in 1966 she became the first woman to be awarded the Grand Prix National des Arts, and in 1969, she was honoured with a major retrospective at the Musée National d’Art Moderne de Paris and the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam.
‘Uncertainty is my certainty’, Vieira da Silva once said: ‘… That is the truth. Everything is relative for me. What is certainty for me is not so for someone else. What is certainty for someone else is not so for me. The world changes. The eyes change’ (M. H. Vieira da Silva quoted in G. Rosenthal, Vieira Da Silva: The Quest for Unknown Space, Cologne 1998, p. 89). Cutting between panoramas, closeups, and elevated vantage points, her paintings bore witness to a world of scattered subjectivity and prismatic ways of seeing. In her later years, her work came closer to lyrical abstraction, gesturing towards realities beyond the surface of the visible. In Rouge indien, the intimated landscape feels at once close and remote, familiar and disorientating. In its impossible topography and chromatic fractures, Vieira da Silva has painted a world that nevertheless feels knowable and true.
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s Rouge indien (Indian Red Earth) (1967) is a mesmeric tessellation of colour. Vivid red streaks bejewelled with fine strips of blue, yellow, green, grey and purple weave together in an intricate chromatic tapestry. They are set within broad-brushed banks of white, creating create the effect of a wintry landscape, or its reflection, partially obscured by vast fields of snow. Without a vanishing point, the viewer’s eye roves over a mysterious terrain in which foreground and background, sky and earth, merge together into one. The painting bears illustrious provenance. First owned by the noted Modernist dealer Theodore Schempp, it was later acquired by Robert and Traude Hensel, whose collection included works by Sonia Delaunay, Serge Poliakoff, and Man Ray, among others. Subsequently, Rouge indien (Indian Red Earth) resided in The Indianapolis Museum of Art for almost three decades.
Born in Lisbon in 1908, Vieira da Silva studied painting at the city’s Escola de Belas-Artes before moving to Paris in 1928 to continue her training at the prestigious Académie de la Grande Chaumière, whose alumni include Joan Miró, Tamara de Lempicka, and Louise Bourgeois. Intrigued by the destabilisation of depth and perspective in Cubist and Futurist painting, her idiom grew increasingly abstract as she sought new ways to represent the world. As Dina Vierny observes, her compositions would go on to collapse boundaries, offering instead both ‘a vision of infinity and an imagined reality … where sensation and thought, order and chaos [all are able to] operate’ (D. Vierny, ‘Preface’, in Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, exh. cat. Musée Maillol, Paris, 1999, p. 9).
Following seven years of exile in Rio de Janeiro with her husband, the Hungarian Jewish painter Árpád Szenes, Vieira da Silva returned to Paris in 1947. She became a central figure in the Art Informel scene alongside other international artists including Jean-Paul Riopelle and Zao Wou-Ki. Like her, these painters were forging new visual languages to take the measure of an era of movement, uncertainty and change. With chequered colour and plunging perspectives, Vieira da Silva’s paintings became decentred mazes or hypnotic mosaics of colour, infused with the disoriented spirit of the age. Her stature grew rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century, and the present work dates from a high point in her critical and commercial success. The 1960s were marked by individual and collective exhibitions throughout the world: in 1966 she became the first woman to be awarded the Grand Prix National des Arts, and in 1969, she was honoured with a major retrospective at the Musée National d’Art Moderne de Paris and the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam.
‘Uncertainty is my certainty’, Vieira da Silva once said: ‘… That is the truth. Everything is relative for me. What is certainty for me is not so for someone else. What is certainty for someone else is not so for me. The world changes. The eyes change’ (M. H. Vieira da Silva quoted in G. Rosenthal, Vieira Da Silva: The Quest for Unknown Space, Cologne 1998, p. 89). Cutting between panoramas, closeups, and elevated vantage points, her paintings bore witness to a world of scattered subjectivity and prismatic ways of seeing. In her later years, her work came closer to lyrical abstraction, gesturing towards realities beyond the surface of the visible. In Rouge indien, the intimated landscape feels at once close and remote, familiar and disorientating. In its impossible topography and chromatic fractures, Vieira da Silva has painted a world that nevertheless feels knowable and true.