{"id":192715,"date":"2025-12-15T10:00:20","date_gmt":"2025-12-15T10:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/192715\/"},"modified":"2025-12-15T10:00:20","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T10:00:20","slug":"a-new-show-at-the-met-may-just-make-finnish-modernist-helene-schjerfbeck-your-new-favourite-artist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/192715\/","title":{"rendered":"A new show at the Met may just make Finnish modernist Helene Schjerfbeck your new favourite artist"},"content":{"rendered":"

An exhibition of works by one of Finland’s most famous artists, Helene Schjerfbeck, will be presented at the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met), giving a Nordic art star a chance to shine<\/p>\n

Long ensconced in the Olympus of Scandinavian art, Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck is finally going global. More than 100 years after her first solo show, in 1917 in Helsinki<\/a>, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is presenting \u201cSeeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck\u201d (through April 5, 2026). The title, in suggesting something impossible, gets at the enigmatic nature of Schjerfbeck\u2019s work, which, though suffused with a melancholic quietude, possesses an unexpected spirit of animation.<\/p>\n

Related: The ultimate guide to the best galleries and must-visit art museums in the Nordics<\/a><\/p>\n

I first encountered the artist\u2019s work at an exhibition in Stockholm<\/a>, where I was struck by one of her self-portraits; Schjerfbeck depicts herself so unflinchingly. It is unclear in the painting whether she is resigned or defiant \u2013 possibly, she\u2019s both. It would have taken some spunk to be successful as a female artist in her time, after all.<\/p>\n

Schjerfbeck was born in 1862 in Helsinki. At four, she suffered a fall that resulted in a long convalescence, during which she entertained herself by making art with the supplies her father brought her. Considered a childhood prodigy, at 18 the Finn received the first of several grants that allowed her to study in Paris and travel in Europe and England.<\/p>\n

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Helene Schjerfbeck, F\u00eate Juive (Sukkot), 1883. Oil on canvas, 45 1\/4 \u00d7 67 11\/16 in. Signe and Ane Gyllenberg Foundation, Helsinki. Photo: Matias Uusikyl\u00e4 \/ Signe and Ane Gyllenberg Foundation<\/p>\n

In 1880s Paris, naturalism and genre paintings were the preferred styles in the Salons where Schjerfbeck exhibited. The visitor to the Met sees how the artist, who was proficient in the vernacular of the time, went on to develop her own more abstract and interpretive style. Even when the subjects aren\u2019t facing the viewer, as in The Seamstress (The Working Woman) (1905), Schjerfbeck\u2019s scenes manage to feel at once spare and expressive, the composition and layers of colour speaking as loudly as the subject.<\/p>\n

Finns are stereotypically reticent, and Schjerfbeck seems to honour that characterisation \u2013 partly in the service of allowing her viewer a say. \u201cLet us avoid executing so precisely and exactly that our work closes the way instead of opening it,\u201d she wrote to a friend. \u201cLet us imply.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Helene Schjerfbeck, Girls Reading, 1907. Watercolor, gouache, and pencil on paper. 26 3\/8 \u00d7 31 1\/8 in. Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki . Photo: Finnish National Gallery \/ Hannu Aaltonen<\/p>\n

Schjerfbeck lived a fairly reclusive life at the time. Returning to Finland in the 1890s, she lived in Helsinki before ill health and the needs of her elderly mother led her to take up residence in the small, rural town of Hyvink\u00e4\u00e4. Then, in 1923, she moved to the seaside town of Tammisaari.<\/p>\n

Related: The 8 best outdoor art venues to visit in the Nordics<\/a><\/p>\n

Despite her geographical seclusion, the 20th century didn\u2019t pass Schjerfbeck by. An avid student of art history, she made a series of paintings after El Greco \u2013 the Greek artist who often painted scenes of religious suffering \u2013 working from black-and-white reproductions. Schjerfbeck\u2019s take on religious subjects had a lighter hand, exemplified by the resplendent Fragment (1904), painted after a trip to Italy to study Renaissance art. The subject is enhaloed with gold that remains luminous despite being worked over and scraped away. This painting, one of the most vulnerable in the exhibition, had special significance to the artist, who tried to locate it and buy it back after selling it.<\/p>\n

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Helene Schjerfbeck, Fragment, 1904. Oil on canvas, 12 3\/8 x 13 3\/8 in. Villa Gyllenberg \/ Signe and Ane Gyllenberg Foundation, Helsinki . Photo: Matias Uusikyl\u00e4 \/ Signe and Ane Gyllenberg Foundation<\/p>\n

Madonnas were represented less frequently in Schjerfbeck\u2019s work than modern women (herself included), whose up-to-dateness was communicated through gesture, makeup, and dress. It was a surprise to read that the artist, known for the gravitas of her work, was rather interested in fashion. As curator Dita Armory explained, Schjerfbeck \u201cdid read fashion magazines, and I know she used patterns acquired from Paris to make her own clothes.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1944, at the suggestion of her gallerist, Schjerfbeck moved to Stockholm, where she painted her final self-portraits \u2013 some of which depict her mortality with an almost Goya-like intensity. She died at the Grand Hotel in 1946; 10 years later, she posthumously represented Finland at the Venice Biennale in the country\u2019s first pavilion, designed by Alvar Aalto<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Schjerfbeck\u2019s work is a discovery in terms of exposure \u2013 she\u2019s little-known beyond the Nordics and in the ways her work relates, by coincidence, to the digital age. Where the artist faced the mirror seemingly without vanity, her interests as a portraitist lay not so much in representing who a subject was as interpreting a form. Amory writes that Schjerfbeck centred \u201clight, space, volume not the soul of the sitter.\u201d Some things, she seemed to determine, must be left sacred.<\/p>\n

Originally published on Vogue.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An exhibition of works by one of Finland’s most famous artists, Helene Schjerfbeck, will be presented at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":192716,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-192715","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/192716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}