The Brooklyn Rail

Helene Schjerfbeck (b. 1862, d. 1946) is a national name and icon in Finland who achieved national recognition during her lifetime, but is an artist mostly unknown outside of her place of origin. Schjerfbeck earned awards, exhibited, and lived off sales through her gallerist Gösta Stenman, while her work existed in museum collections. When Alvar Aalto designed Finland’s pavilion in 1956 for the Venice Biennale, Schjerfbeck’s work alone was featured in the first iteration. Seeing Silence, curated by Dita Amory for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, brings Schjerfbeck global visibility as a notable modernist artist.

A Swedish-speaking Finn, Schjerfbeck was born into the educated class who solely spoke Swedish and enjoyed generational privileges, a background shared by many Finnish artists of this period. She lived in a time when the nation was slowly changing from its previous identities as part of the Kingdom of Sweden and the Russian Empire to becoming an autonomous country centered around Finnish language and culture. As a nascent country, the government at the time had the foresight to value participation in artistic dialogues ongoing in continental Europe. It acknowledged that building the arts played a role in building its identity, and thus its political autonomy. The Finnish Art Society was founded in Helsinki in 1846 and many artists, including Schjerfbeck, studied there and received travel grants. At eighteen, she traveled to Paris, the beacon for art, to learn from artists at the head of atelier-schools and to copy from old masters in museums. Over the course of the next decade of her life, she spent time in Pont-Aven in Brittany, St. Ives in Cornwall, Vienna, and Florence. Many of the Swedish-speaking Finnish artists had similar experiences, first as students in Helsinki, traveling abroad to Europe, and then showing their work in juried salons both in Helsinki and Paris while contributing to a “Finnish” art. Such artists included Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Albert Edelfelt, Ellen Thesleff, Hugo Simberg, Eero Järnefelt, Hilda Flodin, Sigrid Schauman, and (one of the few Finnish speakers) Pekka Halonen.

In 1888 Schjerfbeck painted her early masterpiece, The Convalescent. In a personalized way, this painting channels the movement of light in Impressionist paintings, the quick touch of Edouard Manet, the realist and humanist subjects of Gustave Courbet, along with the warmth of Italian light. This painting is full of striking effects such as the peach of the light, which hits the wicker chair in multiple tones and flickers towards us, revealing the warmth of hay collected in the late summer months. Wicker as blond as the wispy hair of the child wrapped in a blanket, just awoken. The curved branch with green buds balancing from a blue-white pot is a striking moment of green set against the brown and neutral tones of a wall of books, suggesting a literary home. It focuses our attention on new growth, and a feeling of hope as spring sets in, the buds as plump as the flushed cheeks of the recovering child. Schjerfbeck also associated this warm palette with birch, a wood animated with life and sustenance. This kind of woven birch basket, filled with blue-lavender anemones in Blue Anemones in a Chip Basket (1892), is typical in Finland and found in almost every home. The cut flowers signal that the six months of a long, dark winter are over. The Convalescent was exhibited in Paris and later purchased by the Finnish Art Society, today the Ateneum Art Museum.

What could she have learned from Pont-Aven, the town that prompted so many artists like Paul Gauguin, Émile Bernard, Maurice Denis, and others to escape Paris and there explore realism, Expressionism, and Fauvism? The traditions and customs of the Bretons were exoticized to the urban artists and often resulted in paintings of their people, architecture, garb, and customs as other. Schjerfbeck chose to paint quiet, ordinary scenes of life such as the abstracted linens of Clothes Drying (1883), previously drying on a clothesline but now flown onto a grassy meadow. It captures a moment in flight, the thickness of her strokes in cream and camel contrasting the red checkered linens. The thin agility of repeated lines as grass blades mingles with the delicate net protecting the flowers in bloom. The Door (1884), a minimalist composition of cold grays and browns amplifies the silence of this empty interior space. The trace of a blended black diagonal on the floor, the shadow of a structural pillar, disturbs the stillness along with a hint of light from the crack below the church door, offering a promise of warmth and reverberation. The short, scarce, horizontal strokes of four ochres become the light source. The preciousness of light, the power of light, and the acknowledgement of silence held in a moment are characteristics easily valued by a Finnish artist.

At the turn of the century, we see a shift in Schjerfbeck’s work towards a simplified, minimal, and abstract interpretation of the human form. The ideas permeating in Paris were central to artists in Helsinki. As she turned forty, Schjerfbeck abandoned her teaching position (her main source of income) at the Finnish Art Society’s Drawing School for health reasons and moved to Hyvinkää—a train ride away from the capital—lived with her mother, served as her caretaker, and painted. Her previous flickering brushstrokes changed to flattened-out blocks of color and form and scratches-away at the surface with a palette knife, taking away excess. The act of removing, for the essentials to suffice, is both a modernist principle and at the core of Finnish character. The silences of her compositions, the emptiness of the rooms, the simplicity of the clothes worn, the introspective poses, all contribute to the sense that silence is golden, silence is peace, silence is thought, silence is assertion of the self—affirmed during a turbulent time when Finland was resisting an intensified political attempt to Russify its people. Schjerfbeck didn’t overtly contribute to the large-scale heroic, narrative, historical, mythological, romantic, and symbolist paintings meant to build a visible national character different from its bordering neighbors as her peers did. Instead, her works arrive at Finnish identity in the subtle mood of her paintings and her own independent journey as an artist.

It is in this transition of painting alone, away from the city center and from travels abroad, fed by curiosity for modernism, that Schjerfbeck turned her eye to portraiture. Portraits of others, and of herself, became the main subject of her work. Maria (1909), as it is inscribed, is painted in thick layers of blue tones, melted like butter, forming the body of the subject as a mound of color, her face turned away with only neck and hands with fingers delineating a human presence. The inner glow of light is celestial or emanating from one’s intellect moved by reading. Blues are poignant and may allude to the magnificent blue light shimmering against snow, as in the Finnish winter, or perhaps the artist might be remembering her Italian travels and the blue of the Madonna. Fragment (1904) the artwork we could associate most closely with an Italian sense of humanism, holiness, and ruin. The subject’s hair is red-orange, the light purple and peach, scraped down and flattened like fresco. God-like, humble, holy, sensual—in another world.

The erosion by palette knife, which subtracts from top layers of paint, could provide a sense of freedom for Schjerfbeck. No longer tied to covering the whole of the surface, she scraped down, revealing lightness underneath, worn walls, and the ground of the substrate to balance the bare essentials. The 1920 portrait of Schjerfbeck’s landlady, the painting the Met has acquired, contains these minimal lines, suggestions of pattern, and a face with few strokes. It is probing: who is the modern woman? Did this lady, worthy of a portrait of her own, a landlady, represent such a new type of woman in a new Finland, one that had recently become independent?

The selection of still lifes in the exhibition show us the caking paint and palette knife at work, the pears and apples distinguished only by their vague shapes, alternating between thick and thin. How is it that in a faraway land like Finland, Schjerfbeck and her peers adopted modernism so whole-heartedly, without nostalgia? Perhaps the Finns’ readiness to explore modernist ideas was a way to also align their new art with the cultural center at the time—Paris—and to feel truly free to be themselves after fighting for a hard-won independence. It was a freedom to belong to a democratic future, rather than the monarchic past, and to build themselves up on their own terms.

Schjerfbeck’s bold and vulnerable self-portraits stand out and touch you deeply. It is these self-portraits and the haunting qualities they carry, this continuous probing of the self and the directness of her frontal contact, that make her stand out as an artist, perhaps more than her earlier, accomplished historical paintings, still lifes, and portraits of family and close friends. Aside from Rembrandt, Vincent van Gogh, Gauguin, Egon Schiele, and Pablo Picasso, few other artists made more than thirty self-portraits throughout their lifetimes that indicate a passage of time and the changing and morphing body and mind. The last room has a series of self-portraits where progressive changes are visible from early realist, Impressionist strokes to the modernist simplified lines and forms of a dignified woman, to a face sinking into the canvas, abstract and expressionist. Schjerfbeck’s later monotone self-portraits as an octogenarian, from 1944–45, are reduced to a skull and are telling self-revelations of aging amplified by the surrounding turmoil of World War II. The outline of a head, the deepening of the eye sockets, the gaping open mouth in a silent but violent howl: not too far from the angst in Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1895). Schjerfbeck left Finland to seek refuge in Sweden during one of Finland’s deciding wars, the Continuation War (1941–44), the outcome of which determined the future of its people and democratic independence. The anxiety of being away from one’s homeland, of aging, of loneliness, the unimaginable horrors of war, the uncertainty of time: these can all be felt in such unsettling self-portraits.

Schjerfbeck neither spoke nor understood Finnish well, but her determination to paint for her whole life despite the challenges and loneliness, to gain respect, and to pave her own path on the sidelines of nationalist movements, embodies what many Finns would refer to as the untranslatable Finnish word—sisu—an energy that pushes against all odds through impossible challenges with a will as strong as the enduring power of nature.