Paris rediscovered

Without the title of the work for reference, it is difficult to recognise this fragmented mosaic of electric tesserae as a night view of the French capital. Once it has been identified, however, the eye, initially disoriented, instinctively tries to reassemble the parts of the disjointed puzzle. The viewer’s imagination can then set out and wander through the busy streets of Paris by night. From 1938, Vieira da Silva lived in a studio flat at 51 Boulevard Saint-Jacques, not far from the vibrant nightlife of Montparnasse. Ten years earlier, the Portuguese artist had moved to the world’s art capital to round off the training she had begun in Lisbon, her hometown. Eager to gain experience and knowledge, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908–1992) attended various private art academies in Paris.²After the Grande Chaumière, where she briefly attended the courses given by Antoine Bourdelle, Vieira da Silva enrolled at the Académie scandinave where she studied sculpture under Charles Despiau, then painting under Charles Dufresne, Henry de Waroquier and Émile Othon Friesz. In parallel, she took evening classes in engraving at Atelier 17, directed by Stanley William Hayter. She also attended the Académie Colarossi and, lastly, the Académie moderne where she frequented the courses in applied arts given by Fernand Léger. It was on the benches of the Grande Chaumière academy³Located at 14 Rue de la Grande Chaumière in the 6th arrondissement. The academy was founded in 1904. that she met her future husband, the Hungarian painter Árpád Szenes (1897–1985), in 1928. Both had left their home country to settle in “a cosmopolitan and relaxed environment where we created and lived in freedom, surrounded by friends who mostly also came from elsewhere”.⁴BAIRRÃO RUIVO, Marina, “Lisbonne-Paris, les villes de Maria Helena Vieira da Silva”, in THEULIÈRE, Guillaume (ed.), Vieira da Silva, L’œil du labyrinthe, exhibition catalogue [Marseille, Musée Cantini, 10.06 – 06.11.2033; Dijon, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 16.12.2022 – 03.04.2023] (Paris: In Fine éditions d’art, 2022), p. 36. One such artist was the Uruguayan Joaquín Torres-García (1874–1949), whose paintings Vieira da Silva discovered in 1932. Many of her later works reflect this decisive encounter. From Torres-García she adopted the grid-like organisation of the pictorial space (fig. 1), in accordance with a method derived from Cubism, which she would subsequently seek to deconstruct.

The first change in her style was triggered by the dramatic events of World War II that were tearing Europe apart. Árpád Szenes, who was of Jewish origin, felt threatened. The couple were compelled to leave Paris for Lisbon, from where they sailed to Rio de Janeiro in June 1940. Following their return to the French capital in March 1947, Vieira da Silva exhibited her Brazilian works at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher.⁵“Les peintures de Vieira da Silva de retour à Paris”, Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris, 12.06 – 03.07.1947. One was Le Désastre (The Disaster), a genuine “cry of the absurd”⁶Vieira da Silva, quoted in THEULIÈRE, Guillaume (ed.), op. cit., p. 95. for its author (fig. 2). “Afterwards, I realised that I could no longer continue in that way,” she explained, who thereafter wished to “give joy”, and leave to others the possibility of “showing horrors”.⁷Ibid., p. 95.Painted in 1951, Paris, la nuit is one of the works representative of this turning point. It is also one of the most striking contemporary depictions of the metropolis, which was itself undergoing transformation, at the start of the 1950s.

Vieira da Silva left Brazil “to fulfil her Parisian and international destiny”.⁸BAIRRÃO RUIVO, Marina, op. cit., p. 37. Back in the French capital, she connected once again with her friends and steadfast supporters from before the war, primarily the gallery-owner Jeanne Bucher, who exhibited her work once more in 1951.⁹Et puis Voilà. Histoire de Marie-Catherine, gouaches de Vieira da Silva, Galerie Jeanne-Bucher, Paris, 24.11.1951 (opening). That same year, the equally distinguished Galerie Pierre offered Vieira da Silva a second solo exhibition.¹⁰Vieira da Silva, Galerie Pierre, Paris, 1951. It was in this creative ferment that Paris, la nuit was created. The painting was not painted sur le motif, but in her studio on Boulevard Saint-Jacques. She always composed her works from memory, in an attempt to reproduce on canvas the impressions made on her while wandering through the city. “Do not paint objects, but the effect they produce”,¹¹MALLARMÉ, Stéphane, letter to Henri Cazalis, dated 30 October 1864. recommended Stéphane Mallarmé. Vieira da Silva applied this precept to Paris, la nuit, as she did to all the portraits of cities, whether existing or imaginary, that she produced after World War II. The urban landscape became one of her favourite subjects, especially since it accorded perfectly with her pictorial research into perspective, planes and lines.

New spatiality

Indicating renewal, Vieira da Silva’s city becomes a perpetual worksite. Streets, residential buildings, urban furniture, tram cables and overhead metro lines, “everything is reduced to a scaffolding of intersecting lines”.¹²GOLDBERG, Itzhak, “Espèce d’espaces”, in THEULIÈRE, Guillaume (ed.), op. cit., p. 49.Their tangle creates a tightly woven net, like the sprawling network of traffic routes in the then expanding Parisian metropolis. This iron lattice that spans the capital traps the city lights and, with them, the viewer’s gaze, drawing it to zones where the mesh even disappears from time to time, swallowed up in the darkness of the night. This phenomenon of headlong perspective sweeps the gaze from one end of the composition to the other “in a swirling vortex”.¹³THEULIÈRE, Guillaume, “Vieira da Silva, L’œil du labyrinthe”, op. cit., p. 26. Intoxicated by this transport, the observer becomes lost in the delicate ghostly architecture of Paris, la nuit. “It is there that Vieira da Silva’s eye travels, in the silence of the voids and then the clash and fracture of the lines”.¹⁴Ibid., p. 26. Her “cyclonic and prismatic eye”, the creator of “a visionary painting”, in the words of Guillaume Theulière, invents a new spatiality with shifting contours like “a labyrinth in constant expansion”.¹⁵Ibid., p. 26.

Fragmentation of the real

Vieira da Silva’s cities are as extensive and teeming as her mental landscape allows. Like thoughts, they are constantly in motion. To depict this permanent instability, she methodically fragmented the space. Beginning in the 1930s, she employed a diamond pattern to facet her compositions. The famous painting La Machine optique (The Optical Machine) of 1937 (fig. 3) attests the early use of this repeated motif that allowed her – as Op art would systematize it later – “to introduce mobility within the pictorial matter itself”.¹⁶GOLDBERG, Itzhak, op. cit., p. 51. Like jewels in their settings, the diamonds reflect the light like the azulejos that lined Vieira da Silva’s childhood memories. In Paris, la nuit, they mirror and multiply the lights of the modern city, like those of the neon shop signs that began to reappear after the blackout of the war.¹⁷Neon lights were patented by the Frenchman Claude Georges. He installed the first neon shop light in 1912 on the roof of 14 Boulevard Haussmann with the aim of attracting passers-by to the hairdressing salon, Le Palais Barbier. Neon lighting had its heyday in the interwar period. The seemingly disorderly repetition of the electric lozenges echoes “the sounds and chatter of the urban setting”.¹⁸THEULIÈRE, op. cit. It is also the instrument, one might say the key, used by Vieira da Silva to open up new perceptive possibilities which, at that time, were not unrelated to cinema. The link with the seventh art has been underlined by Daniel Abadie, who notes that, in the fixed image of the painting, the artist integrated “the very principles of cinematographic vision: high- and low-angle shots, zooming effects, tracking, panoramic shots, etc.; even the breaks in perspective can be compared to sequential shots, since in both cases an active gaze is involved”.¹⁹ABADIE, Daniel, “Vieira da Silva, Lais et relais du regard”, in Vieira da Silva, exhibition catalogue [Paris, Fondation Diana Vierny-Musée Maillol, 03.03 – 13.06.1999; L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, Musée Campredon, 03.07 – 03.10.1999], p. 15. In the maze-like space of Paris, la nuit, the moving eye, lacking landmarks in the darkness, instinctively seeks the reassuring light of the boulevards. It is there, at the junctions of the major roads, that the ballet of luminous letters dances to the rhythm of Eugène Deslaw’s (1898–1966) Nuits électriques (Electric Nights). This experimental film made in 1928 (fig. 4), followed in the 1930s by the night-time photographs of Man Ray (fig. 5) and Brassaï, illustrates the immediate appeal of the capital’s new face, illuminated by incandescent light.

Electric nights

The light of progress is the enemy of the darkness of night. In Paris, la nuit, the sky is eclipsed by the halo of public lighting. Without waiting for this to become commonplace, artists strove to capture the new appearance and atmosphere of their living environment. The illuminated city offered a new plasticity whose artistic value was recognised at the end of the 18th century by Nicolas Restif de Le Bretonne (1734–1806). In his astonishing nocturnal wanderings (Les Nuits de Paris), the writer fell under the spell of “the glow of street lamps”, which, according to him, did not destroy the shadows but, on the contrary, made them “sharper”, recognising in this metamorphosis “the chiaroscuro of the great painters!”²⁰Nicolas Restif de La Bretonne, Les Nuits de Paris ou le spectateur nocturne (1786-1877) (Paris: Gallimard, “Folio classique”, 1986), pp. 33-34, own trans. Quoted in Gallais, Jean-Marie, “Se perdre dans la nuit”, in: Peindre la nuit, exhibition catalogue [Metz, Centre Pompidou-Metz, 13.10.2018 – 14.04.2019], p. 54. Among them, William Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) was the first, around 1870, to make the night a real pictorial experience, of which infinite variations have since been produced. Paris, la nuit is one of those created in 1951, together with Amédée Ozenfant’s Une rue, la nuit (Street at night, fig. 6) and Eugene Bennett’s Night Lights (fig. 7). The differences between these various nocturnal visions points up the outstanding originality of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s art, whose poetry transports us beyond reality, to where the imaginary begins.

Bertrand Dumas
Curator of the Fine Arts collection
Fondation Gandur pour l'Art, October 2022