The City
Artist: Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (French, 1908-1992)
Date: 1951
Dimensions:
H: 37 1/4 in. (94.6 cm); W: 32 1/4 in. (81.9 cm)
Medium: Oil on canvas.
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey
Object number: 1953.134
Label Text:Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s The City creates a complex and labyrinth-like architectural structure—a fragmented suggestion of buildings and streets, like reflections in broken shards of glass. A sense of deep space is developed through intersecting lines, overlapping shapes, and layered color. Vieria da Silva explained, “Perspective is one of my passions. Not scientific perspective, but that which I rediscover, make out of rhythm, out of music…with the aid of which it is possible to suggest a huge space on a tiny piece of canvas.”
After moving to Paris from her native Lisbon, Portugal at the age of 19, Vieira da Silva studied painting under Fernand Léger. Her work responds not only to Léger’s Cubist investigations into the representation of space, but also to Modernist interest in the grid as a compositional structure (see, for example, Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, Yellow, Black, and Gray in Gallery 3).
After moving to Paris from her native Lisbon, Portugal at the age of 19, Vieira da Silva studied painting under Fernand Léger. Her work responds not only to Léger’s Cubist investigations into the representation of space, but also to Modernist interest in the grid as a compositional structure (see, for example, Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, Yellow, Black, and Gray in Gallery 3).
On view
In Collection(s)