La Bataille des couteaux [Tapestry] (1981) - Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908-1992)

            Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation, Amoreira Garden, Lisbon, Portugal

Material: Tapestry, coloured wool
Produced by The Portage Tapestry Manufacture
Dimension: 228x270 cm
Number: nº 1 of 6
Collection: Santander Totta Bank

NOTE: Made from the Oil Painting  on canvas "La Bataille des Couteaux (1948)
Catalogue Raisonné Nº 585

VIEIRA DA SILVA AND PORTALEGRE TAPESTRIES

As a producer of pieces of art at the service of painters, the Portalegre Tapestry Manufacture has always worked alongside the artistic movements of its time.
Over a span of only 75 years, the Portalegre Tapestry Manufacture has used a specific hand-weaving technique known as "Portalegre weaving" to carve a space for itself in a country that, in spite of having a long tradition in textile production, only valued tapestries if they came from France or the Flanders. From Portugal, Portalegre tapestries have spread across the world: today they can be found in every continent.

By giving textile form to works by major names in contemporary art, the Portalegre Tapestry Manufacture helps keep alive one of Western civilisation's oldest and richest art forms: wall tapestries.
These tapestries are original pieces of art, the outcome of a unique collaboration between the painter, the designer and the weavers.

The Portalegre Tapestry Manufacture takes an original painting and converts it into another medium, thus revealing a new dimension of the work. Rather then a simple reproduction, the resulting tapestry is a veritable work of art, due to its intrinsic qualities and to the methods involved in its creation.
More than 200 Portuguese and foreign painters have seen their work turned into Portalegre tapestries.

As one of the foremost names in Portuguese painting, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva could not have been left out of this "Portuguese Adventure".

After being invited by Guy Fino in 1960, she sent the original of Mouraria to the tapestry workshop.

Even tough Mouraria comes across today as the "easiest" piece of tapestry by Vieira da Silva, it was something quite unprecedented in terms of what had been the standard of tapestry production during the 1950s, and confronted the Manufacture, especially it's designers, with major problems, detailed in the letters Guy Fino wrote to Vieira da Silva between November 1960 and October 1961.

The process of turning the original into a tapestry implies, on a first stage, enlarging it, correcting it and selecting the weft colours to be used. The designer, on whom rests the responsibility for faithfully translating the painter spirit into another medium, enlarges the original, doing away with non-essentials so that the final piece will do the original justice. So that as Guy Fino wrote to Vieira da Silva, "one will see in the tapestry what one saw in the original art".

   

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Taken in: Portugal / Lisbon / São Mamede (show map)

Taken on: July 10, 2014

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Maria Helena Vieira da Silva

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Camera: Leica Camera AG M9 Digital Camera, 1/60 sec, 50mm, ISO 2000 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Leica Camera AG M9 Digital Camera
Exposure Time:	0.017 sec (1/60)
Focal Length:	50mm
ISO:	2000
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	No Flash
Exposure Program:	Manual
Exposure Mode:	Manual
Metering Mode:	Center-weighted average
White Balance:	Manual
Light Source:	Daylight Fluorescent
Color Space:	Uncalibrated
Software:	1.174
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