In brief: We’ve uncovered so many pleasures on free museum days. One of the best was the artistry of Vieira da Silva and Arpad Szenes.
It was an old soap factory located next to Jardim das Amoreiras, a delightful park and kiosk area in the shadow of the old aqueduct. Now it’s a museum dedicated to a celebrated pair of Portuguese and Hungarian painters, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and Arpad Szenes. As we discovered in their intriguing artworks, they shared global influences and attention, as well as roots in Lisbon.
And our access was free on a Sunday, like many others in town which we’ve enjoyed over the last year, large and small.
Szenes: Sables et Golfes[“sands and bays”], mid 1970s. An oil painting that looks like a watercolor. A scene from nature that becomes an abstract dreamscape.
Vieira da Silva: Au fur et à mesure [“along with/while”], 1965. One of the best introductions to her work, which is filled with architectural elements and grids. Here one visually falls into the painting, as it mixes several perspectives on a kind of building structure, plays with repetition of elements, and presents different planes of viewing. The tiled sections are at once floors, walls, stairs, while the color scheme on the periphery complements – and relieves – the black center formed by the dense lines.
Vieira da Silva: La Cage aux Oiseaux {“the bird cage”] 1948. She shows a lot with a few lines. Here we are caught visually in a cage with a whirl of colors that is within and beyond the grid, opening up the cage.
Szenes: Interieur 1935. The works displayed at the museum show both artists playing at times off Matisse’s work. This one abuts various planes and interior wall coverings in an artist’s workspace, and includes a whimsical set of eyeglasses.
Vieira da Silva: Untitled 1941. This seems to be a tribute to tiled walls in Portugal, with a twist detectable in the surrealist feet at the bottom. The feet turn out to part of a ghostly human figure that emerges from a blend with the tilework when looks long and closely enough.
(To enlarge any picture above, click on it. Also, for more pictures from Portugal, CLICK HERE to view the slideshow at the end of the itinerary page.)
