MÁRIA LEHEL

(1889-1972)

Portrait d'une femme (peut-être Clarice Lispector)

Footnotes

Provenance
Private collection, UK.
Private collection, London (acquired from the above in 2023).


A rare figure whose career linked the artistic cultures of Central Europe, France, Italy and Brazil, Mária Lehel occupies a distinctive place within the international modernist diaspora of the twentieth century. Lehel studied under the noted Hungarian modernists Károly Ferenczy and Béla Iványi Grünwald, and subsequently exhibited with The Eight, an avant-garde group of Hungarian painters active primarily in Budapest from 1909 to 1918. Her early practice was shaped by the naturalist ethos of the Nagybánya Artists' Colony, and after the First World War it evolved into a sustained engagement with pastel, through which she cultivated a refined vocabulary of lyrical restraint in still lifes and landscapes. A formative period in France during the 1920s brought her into contact with Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall and Jules Pascin, encounters that prompted a shift toward a lighter, more decorative pictorial language aligned with European modernism. Although many of her works were lost during the Second World War, from 1939 onward she worked primarily in Italy, maintaining an active international exhibition career across Europe and South America. Her work is now represented in national museums in São Paulo, Budapest, Rome, and Genoa.

The present work, executed in 1946, is thought to depict Clarice Lispector, the Ukrainian-born Brazilian writer whose experimental prose transformed mid-century Latin American literature. Born to a Jewish family fleeing persecution, Lispector arrived in Brazil as a child and grew to become one of the country's most original and influential literary voices. Her debut novel Near to the Wild Heart (1943), written at just twenty-three, revolutionised Brazilian literature with its radical interiority and modernist subjectivity. At the time this portrait was made, Lehel was residing in Genoa, where Lispector also lived briefly, shortly after Giorgio de Chirico had painted her portrait in Rome in 1945. Lehel's earlier ties to Brazil — including a successful solo exhibition in São Paulo in 1937 — further underscore the resonance of this possible meeting between two pioneering women in art and literature, one Brazilian by adoption and the other deeply connected to Brazil through her career.

Lispector's biographer, Benjamin Moser, described the writer's singular presence: strikingly beautiful, with cat-green eyes, a glamour some compared to Marlene Dietrich, and a sensual charisma heightened by her trademark dramatic makeup and oversized jewellery. The present work incorporates these visual characteristics with remarkable sensitivity. Lehel's thick, confident use of pastel generates a radiant spectrum of colour that seems to shimmer across the sitter's features, capturing not only Lispector's distinctive appearance but also the intensity, mystery and interior luminosity that defined her literary voice. Through this fusion of likeness and atmosphere, Lehel offers a portrait that is both evocative and psychologically acute — a rare artistic encounter between two of the twentieth century's most compelling creative figures.