April 22 to September 25, 2020
744 Madison Avenue, at 65th Street
New York City, didonna.com

The paintings of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva exist in a perpetual ambivalence between an abstracted perspectival matrix and a figurative sense of place, often sliding between an interior and a panoramic urban view.  Both motifs are united by a cool spectral transparency; everything is an interiority.

Portugal’s most famous modern artist and a leading exemplar of Art Informel (Europe’s equivalent of Abstract Expressionism), Vieira da Silva was the subject of a rare traveling exhibition staged by three international galleries. Following its debut in Paris at Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger in 2019 and Waddington Custot Gallery in London in 2019-20, this selected retrospective opened in the spring at Di Donna Gallery just in time to close under lockdown. It enjoyed a limited reopening this fall, which is when I was able to view it. Hard though it is to believe, this was the first exhibition of her work in New York since 1971.

Typically, as we gaze into her paintings, stage-like fields of latticework expand before our eyes until they become, in Gaston Bachelard’s phrase, an “intimate immensity.” We begin to notice subtle disturbances in the field of forces that allow us to detect hints of objects and personages or their absence; we are in a chrysalis of the shifting self.

Her use of projective geometry, specifically linear perspective, takes on any number of variations melded into one another. Often there may be a grid running parallel to the picture surface that opens up as a relief space, by shifts in scale and multiple overlapping planes. Many web-like grids are articulated with a chessboard’s alternation in white, blue, grey or umber tones. Some spatial constructs emphasize a discontinuous space, where through curving forces, we become disoriented and find our eyes swimming into a whirlpool.

Often Vieira da Silva’s works are modestly scaled for intimate contemplation. A superb exception is The Monorail, 1955, a 63” x 86.6” mural in the Nordrhein-Westfalen Art Museum where it easily holds its own in a room of masterpieces. In the show at Di Donna, the most complexly polyphonic work and the largest is Memoire, 1966-67, 44 7/8” x 57 ½”, an elaborate ‘memory palace’. Such a mnemonic system relies on spatial relationships to establish order and recollect information and experiences. Here the cubist grid multiplies into an ever-expanding map defined by delicate lines and touches: melodious, delicate but hesitant. Gradually, I felt a subtle feeling of anguish, as I sensed the signs of remembered experiences retreating in all directions. I only began to absorb the complex music of this work after long viewing.

More easily comprehensible and seductive is La Ville nocturne ou les Luminières de la ville, 1950. On a cobalt blue-grey field of space floats a constellation of glowing, colored lights, with yellow, red-orange, and cerulean punctured with discrete passages of black. Here is a rainy night vision of a truly disembodied city, where the lights hold spatial positions, opening corridors—passageways for our eyes to flow through—returning on the gyre of a swooping black or red-orange curve. The whole is a rare performance of sure, adroit touches of paint, emphasizing its materiality. By their seeming formlessness, each spot, daub, or spindly streak half conceals an intricate architectural network. I see this as a work in conversation with Vieira da Silva’s contemporary, Wols., 1952, is an unusually luminous work for Vieira da Silva, who is essentially a tonalist. The painting is a fugue in oranges, modulated by red-violet, chrome-yellow, yellow-ochres, pink-purple and ultramarine. It glows with an anti-materialist essence, like that of a stained-glass window, which gives it a close rapport with the spiritual qualities of fellow painters Alfred Manessier and Roger Bissière. Fully in the morphology of cubism, this picture is filled with a shifting grid of shelf-like units that recede on a central vertical axis, as if to suggest the corner of a room, or the opposing pages of a medieval codex.

This is the sort of spiritually evocative work that may have influenced Loren MacIver in works like Votive Lights. Similarly, another unusual picture on an airy field of white, Untitled, 1955, parallels an oceanic figural processional space explored by Norman Lewis.

In an essay in the show’s catalogue, Kent Mitchell Minturn dislodges her from the nationalistic ‘jeune’ École de Paris, and the gestural, anti-geometric Tachism, re-labelling her a late cubist. While this does make some sense, it does her no historical favors to cut her off from interaction with her contemporaries in this bid for uniqueness. Indeed, a number of works in the exhibition contradict this volte-face, as I have shown above.

While I have doted on several of the works that employ color as a pictorial dynamic, much of the other two dozen works in this exhibition function with a cubist tonality, even when a single strong color or two are employed. It worked for Picasso and it works for Vieira da Silva too. Her “Teatrum mundi” was also a way to create a unity between tradition and modernity—not exactly “the tradition” but a personal one that follows partially unconscious emotions. In a Vieira da Silva, there is no certainty.

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April 6 – June 18, 2011
10 River Terrace, between Murray and Barclay streets,
New York City, (212) 431-7920

Poets may be the unacknowledged legislators of the world but they also serve as the equally unacknowledged binding agents, conduits and couriers, if not social cement, of a larger culture, especially that of the visual arts. Grace of light baggage, worldly and literal; fleetness of foot and phrase; obligatory diplomacy allied to a natural penchant for poverty and sprightly sense of survival: the poet often plays a crucial, though naturally unpaid, role in the art world.

The very epitome of this position might be the life and career of Alberto de Lacerda, a Portugese poet whose friends and supporters included the widest possible swathe of painters, sculptors, publishers, editors, fellow writers and thorough bohemians, stretched across as many continents as professions. Born in Portugese Mozambique in 1928, Lacerda spent the majority of his working life in London, whilst regularly shuttling between England and America where he taught at several universities, including Boston to and Columbia.

This roaming existence traversed several particularly fertile decades of creative change, from the relative austerity of 1950s London, to the narcotic wonderland of  ‘60s America. Lacerda profited richly from these shifting times, places and mores, happily exploiting his obviously abundant talent for friendship.

Indeed, what is fascinating about the exemplary exhibition – entirely drawn from his Estate – at Poets House is the sheer range of his connections spanning such seemingly disparate cultures and cities.

Laid out in a series of vitrines is a selection of utterly delicious ephemera tracing his society trajectory, from a luncheon seating plan in the hand of Dame Edith Sitwell, along with a telegram inviting him to eat with T.S. Eliot and William Walton, to snapshots of Lacerda with such friends as Ocatvio Paz, Martha Graham and Stephen Spender.  There are manuscripts and dedicated books given to him by the likes of Anne Sexton, Robert Duncan andMarianne Moore.

On arriving in London in 1951 Lacerda began to work for the BBC but was soon publishing his own work, not least in the Times Literary Supplement.  His first book, 77 Poems, was translated in conjunction with none less than Arthur Waley, the fabled sinologist and expert on Chinese verse.

Amongst his other achievements, Lacerda drank with Dylan Thomas, introduced Fernando Pessoa to the English-speaking world, and traveled to the newly built Brasilia with its architect Oscar Niemeyer. Having, as it were, conquered postwar London, Lacerda moved in 1967 to Austin, to take up a position at the University of Texas. Here, to general surprise, not least his own, the entirely cosmopolitan sophisticate found himself equally happy, even if eventually moving back to his fabled abode at Primrose Mansions, Prince of Wales Drive where he died in 2007.

Through these peregrinations Lacerda maintained long associations with as many visual artists as writers, which thanks to these vagaries of time and place, resulted in his forming an eclectic and truly international collection, shown at its best throughout the generous length of Poets House. Part of this private collection was exhibited at the Gulbenkian in Lisbon in 1987, and its re-appearance here in Battery Park seems a fortuitous, if somewhat improbable, blessing.

Perhaps the most striking works are by two rightly celebrated Portugese women artists, Vieira da Silva and Paula Rego, both of whom are well represented here, with drawings and prints stretching from 1943 to 1997.

Likewise some of Lacerda’s more celebrated friends such as David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Patrick Caulfield and even Henry Miller here make their mark. But there are equally impressive works by Arpad Szenes, Pavel Tchelitchew, Victor Willing, David Jones and Alan Davie, artists all too rarely shown in New York, and now making a welcome appearance in the city entirely, ironically, thanks to their poet colleague.

A good many of these works are, naturally, images of the poet himself, including a charming parchment portrait by the late lamented Rory McEwen, but there are also portraits that Lacerda collected of other poets by other artists, among them François Villon’s Rimbaud and Manet’s Baudelaire.

And here we understand Lacerda as part of precisely such a lineage, an archetype almost, the poet who knows everyone and everything yet always lives in the shadow of the wealth that threatens his artist-friends, a sort of ‘Zelig’ of the zeitgeist. They always have archives, saving every scrap of their possible posterity, and for some reason always make collages themselves, that medium being somehow specific to every poet. Lacerda is represented by one such work from 1990. If ideal exemplars might be Mallarmé or Eluard, then Manhattan is oddly well stocked with such characters, from Charles Henri Ford to Rene Ricard and Max Blagg, collector-collagist-catalysts of the culture all.

This welcome presentation of Lacerda’s collection makes clear the sheer continuity of the poet’s place amongst artists, at least since the Romantic era, an indefinable yet vital creative presence whose continuation is devoutly to be wished.

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