Like most of her compositions, this shimmering work with a revealing title—Every House is a Season—takes us on an inner journey. Signed Maria Vieira da Silva, this painting will be one of the highlights of the upcoming sale of the collection of Pierre and Jeannine Consten, two French aesthetes who dedicated their lives to very different art forms. These include a fine group of modern paintings by Pablo Picasso, Jacques Villon, Jean Bazaine and, of course, Vieira da Silva. She and her husband, the artist Árpád Szenes, were close friends of the Constens, so it is unsurprising to find five brilliant works by the Lisbon-born painter here.

Dating from 1974, Every House is a Season has the additional quality of summing up Vieira da Silva’s work, as it stands at a decisive turning point in her long creative journey. In the center of the composition, an azure square opens like a window in the sky, letting the eye escape from the geometric grids occupying a large part of the surface: in glowing red on the left, in blue-gray on the right. These structures consisting of fine parallel, rhythmic striations were recurring motifs in her work from the 1950s on (after checkerboards, spirals and grids), which she had already developed before the Second World War. Often associated with the theme of an invasive city—tellingly summed up in the title of a recent exhibition at the Dijon Museum of Fine Arts (“Vieira da Silva. The Eye of the Labyrinth)—, in around 1980 these elements gave way to more evanescent, immaterial spaces, here ushered in by a wide band of deep blue.

Strikingly, the palette she uses here responds word for word to a poem she wrote at the end of her life: “The Will”. In it, she lists her favorite colors, linking each of them with a power: “I bequeath to my friends…/A cerulean blue to soar high up/A cobalt blue for happiness/An ultramarine to stimulate the mind/A vermilion to make the blood circulate gaily (…)”. Signed and dated on the bottom right, the painting has a label on the back of the stretcher from her official gallery, Jeanne Bucher at 53 Rue de Seine, and a certificate dated January 8, 1976, accompanies the composition. The painting later entered Pierre and Jeannine Consten’s collection, but was not forgotten: it was listed in the catalogue raisonné by G. Weelen and J.-F. Jaeger in 1994 as no. 2714.

COLLECTION PIERRE & JEANNINE CONSTEN

Tuesday 23 May 2023 – 14:30 (CEST) – Live