{"id":487448,"date":"2026-02-20T10:38:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T10:38:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/487448\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T10:38:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T10:38:08","slug":"an-unknown-woman-how-i-discovered-a-hidden-tragedy-tied-to-russias-most-famous-painting-painting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/487448\/","title":{"rendered":"An Unknown Woman: how I discovered a hidden tragedy tied to Russia\u2019s most famous painting | Painting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sentimental Value is one of those films you have to watch very closely. In the Norwegian director Joachim Trier\u2019s latest work<\/a>, which swept the board at the European film awards and is nominated for eight Baftas and nine Oscars, stories are hidden in closeups, half-tones and peripheral objects. Some of these stories are so well hidden, in fact, that they aren\u2019t even apparent to the people who made the film.<\/p>\n

In one scene, roughly an hour in, the camera glides down a corridor, and suddenly there she is: a woman\u2019s portrait on the wall. Anyone who grew up in the Soviet Union and later Russia<\/a> between the 1950s and 2000s, like me, would recognise her instantly. She has been endlessly reproduced: as prints, embroideries, portrait medallions, even on boxes of chocolates. In Britain, people may have encountered her on the covers of various editions of Anna Karenina.<\/p>\n

In wide circulation \u2026 a Russian postage stamp from 2012 shows Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Photograph: Alexander Mitrofanov\/Alamy<\/p>\n

Portrait of an Unknown Woman is a painting by Ivan Kramskoy, a celebrated Russian portraitist. Kramskoy began his career as a provincial retoucher before being admitted to the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. There, he went on to lead the Revolt of the Fourteen \u2013 a protest over the right to choose their subject for the Academy\u2019s gold medal competition. The rebels later became known as the peredvizhniki, or the Wanderers, a group of artists who continued their protest by organising travelling exhibitions across the Russian empire.<\/p>\n

In 1883, Kramskoy painted Neizvestnaya (the Romanised Russian for Portrait of an Unknown Woman), quietly hoping it would end up with Pavel Tretyakov, the founder of the Tretyakov Gallery \u2013 Russia\u2019s leading museum of national art \u2013 and the guardian angel of the Wanderers. It didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

To understand why, one has to look at the Unknown Woman through the eyes of her contemporaries. The woman is seated alone in an open carriage against the misty backdrop of St Petersburg \u2013 she is beautiful, but also carries an air of arrogance. For a woman, sitting alone was already a faux pas. The clothes made it worse: a fashionable velvet hat, a coat and muff trimmed with ribbons, gold bracelets. She had put on her Sunday best \u2013 something a society lady would never have done.<\/p>\n

Screen print \u2026 a copy of Portrait of an Unknown Woman, left, as it appears in Sentimental Value. Photograph: J\u00f8rgen Stangebye Larsen<\/p>\n

Reviewers called her \u201ca cocotte in a carriage\u201d, \u201ca costly camellia\u201d, and \u201cone of the monstrous offspring of the great metropolis\u201d. Tretyakov, who came from a conservative merchant background, was hardly eager to plant any monstrous camellias in his own house.<\/p>\n

Portrait of an Unknown Woman was later acquired by a collector in Kyiv, and then by Pavel Kharitonenko, a Ukrainian sugar magnate. After the revolution, his property was taken over by the state. His Moscow house became the residence of the British ambassador \u2013 and the Unknown Woman eventually entered the Tretyakov Gallery, in violation not only of private property rights but also of Tretyakov\u2019s own wishes.<\/p>\n

After the second world war, the Soviet state sought to compensate the population for its immense suffering by granting a modest expansion of cultural life. With no real art market to speak of, private life became furnished with millions of cheap reproductions in gilt frames. The Unknown Woman was the runaway hit. She was mysterious amid the blunt visual language of Soviet symbols, bourgeois against the backdrop of grim everyday reality, and even a little sexy in a country whose official culture was resolutely prudish. She hung in almost every Soviet flat.<\/p>\n

Runaway hit \u2026 the Unknown Woman in one of many appearances as the cover star of Anna Karenina, shown here in a Serbian bookstore in 2023. Photograph: Jerome Cid\/Alamy<\/p>\n

So when I spotted Kramskoy\u2019s painting in Trier\u2019s film, I was intrigued and wanted to find out more. What was the meaning of the Unknown Woman here? I decided to investigate, and sent a message to the film\u2019s production designer, J\u00f8rgen Stangebye Larsen. His reply told the story of an unknown woman who became a known woman almost instantly.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, this was not the first time the portrait had appeared in Trier\u2019s films. In Oslo, 31 August \u2013 Trier\u2019s second film, from 2011 \u2013 the heroin addict Anders returns to his family home at the end of the last day of his life. The house is about to be sold. As the camera glides through the rooms, the portrait briefly floats past, still hinged to the wall.<\/p>\n

Fifteen years later, the same wooden house in Oslo returns at the centre of Sentimental Value<\/a>, housing the members of a troubled family from the early 1900s to the present day. The portrait appears again, this time in a flashback to the 1930s: a young woman comes of age, joins the resistance during the war, is arrested and tortured, and years later takes her own life in the same house.<\/p>\n

The portrait in Trier\u2019s film is not one of the countless cheap Soviet reproductions but a loose copy after Kramskoy, painted by a close friend of Larsen\u2019s stepmother, long before he became one of Trier\u2019s collaborators.<\/p>\n

Unknown \u2026 Hedvig Broch, who painted a loose copy of Kramskoy\u2019s portrait. Photograph: Family photo<\/p>\n

She was called Hedvig Broch, and this is the story he told me about her. Broch had wanted to become an artist since childhood, but her father insisted she find a \u201creal\u201d profession, so she enrolled at university instead of the academy. After majoring in sociology, she was admitted to the art academy in Copenhagen \u2013 but her husband forced her to choose between her studies and their marriage. She chose her husband.<\/p>\n

Larsen told me she later became a very special presence in his life \u2013 a trusted adult figure \u2013 when he was a child. On Zoom, her daughter, Tiril Broch Aakre, recalls how Larsen used to perform magic tricks for her, while she, in turn, became a confidant of his teenage secrets. Broch and Larsen\u2019s mother also had a ritual of their own: a Friday book club, just the two of them, sitting together and discussing whatever they were reading. Dostoevsky was among their favourites.<\/p>\n

When she turned 50, Broch finally did what she had dreamed of for decades. She left her job and returned to painting in earnest. Russian artists such as Kramskoy had long been admired by Norwegian and Finnish painters, and one day Tiril came home to find a striking portrait of a young woman her mother had just completed. \u201cIt had, you know, a kind of soulfulness and vulnerability,\u201d she tells me. \u201cIt just struck me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hedvig\u2019s Portrait of an Unknown Woman is very different from Kramskoy\u2019s. The arrogant demi-mondaine turns into a figure that is still mysterious, but far more melancholy. The crew\u2019s return to the wooden house in Oslo 15 years later was not the only reason Larsen chose to use the portrait again. Between the two films, Hedvig Broch \u2013 just like the protagonist of Oslo, 31 August and the mother figure in Sentimental Value \u2013 took her own life.<\/p>\n

I called Trier and asked him whether this was life imitating art. He told me he had known nothing about the portrait\u2019s history, and that its use in the film had not been intentional. Then he quoted a line from Goethe\u2019s Faust to me: man merkt die Absicht und man ist verstimmt (\u201cyou work out what their intention is and it breaks the spell\u201d).<\/p>\n

Yet memory, unlike art, sometimes survives by intention alone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sentimental Value is one of those films you have to watch very closely. In the Norwegian director Joachim…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":487449,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-487448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=487448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487448\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/487449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=487448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=487448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=487448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}