Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Images are beautiful bright and vivid. Very slight tan to page edges. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> We see a little girl from behind standing on one of the rungs. Her head is upturned as she assesses the climb ahead of her. The choice of title for this painting Self-Portrait (1932 p. 6) comes as a surprise to the viewer. Maria Helena Vieira da Silva was twenty-four years old and had already painted herself as a young woman several times when she produced this portrayal of herself as a child between heaven and earth. Conversations and interviews with da Silva confirm just how important the first years of her life were to her painting. When she talked about that period. she did so hesitantly in words that left things unsaid indeed unutterable. Her discourse about her life and work as a whole was marked by the meticulous care with which she used language. This wavering between the urge to reveal herself and the fear of touching on painful matters was also reflected in the life-long refinement of her unmistakable pictorial idiom. My memories go back to a very early age. I started to live when I was two years old really to live and think and that life became a complete world. The first impressions I recall are of Christmas in Switzerland. I can still see the snow the mountains the skiers the sledges…” Vieira recalled the corridors of the sanatorium and the room which her parents lived in; she herself shared another with her Portuguese governess. She did not touch on the experience that triggered these memories but it made an indelible impression for her sick father an embassy attach? and son of a diplomat had gone to Leysin with his family in the winter of 1910 in order to heal his tuberculosis. He died in the sanatorium in February 1911. (LL)