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Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Friends of Ateneum Collection, Helsinki\/Photograph by Henri Tuomi<\/p>\n
Helene Schjerfbeck: Self-Portrait, 1884-85<\/p>\n
The Paris Salon and trips to Brittany furthered their education in academic and avant-garde French art, but Westermarck stopped painting when she contracted tuberculosis in 1884. Schjerfbeck\u2019s portrait of her from that year, wearing a painter\u2019s smock, is one of her most affecting. Westermarck\u2019s mouth falls opens in absorption, her brow crinkling behind her pince-nez. Schjerfbeck\u2019s self-portrait from the same period is likewise all focus, no vanity, with one eye directly engaging the viewer and the other skewing to the side. She faces us, unlike Westermarck, but only half of her face meets our gaze. By harmonizing her honey-blonde hair with the background and her smock, she makes her ivory skin, pink cheeks, and blue-gray eyes pop. The torque of her neck and the difference between the two sides of her face\u2014besides the exotropic eyes, one cheek is more flushed, one side of the mouth fuller, darker, more defined\u2014make her appear evasive and assertive at once.<\/p>\n
Schjerfbeck is best known for her self-portraits, but she was also an inventive painter of other people, landscapes, still lifes, and interiors. An expert at surface textures and light effects, she also had an eye for abstract form even in her early naturalistic works. Clothes Drying is a landscape of laundry, an oblique view of a small stretch of lawn strewn with linens of a hard-to-determine scale. Tufts of grass and sticks look like trees, overlapping sheets like the roofs of a town. The fascination of the picture is the juxtaposition of two-dimensional shapes rendered in loose strokes with finely painted flowers, plants, and dirt. Critics found it baffling.<\/p>\n
Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki\/Photograph by Yehia Eweis<\/p>\n Helene Schjerfbeck: Clothes Drying, 1883<\/p>\n Strong shapes and vivid brushwork also animate The Door, depicting a shadowy corner of a gothic chapel in Brittany. Schjerfbeck draws a rainbow of color\u2014blue, green, yellow, pink, and red\u2014from a white wall, a brown floor, and a black door. The slivers of sunlight shining through the edges of this forbidding portal\u2014the inverse of the window featured in so many late nineteenth-century Nordic interiors\u2014give threshold and lintel a psychological charge and softly illuminate the scuffs on the floor. It is a severe composition filled with sensuous pleasure: the rust-colored paint dripping down the wall and the grays, blacks, and blues swirling over the floorboards seem more about playing with color and texture than about recording a place.<\/p>\n Schjerfbeck was remarkably independent as a young woman, traveling freely with and without her \u201cpainter sisters.\u201d She never married or had children; with no financial cushion from her family, she had to live off her art. Although she eventually had a dealer who represented her in Helsinki and Stockholm, and a friend who published her first biography when she was fifty-five, she orchestrated her own career and was uncompromising in her self-presentation, refusing to participate in exhibitions that did not reflect her current aesthetic commitments.<\/p>\n It helped that her life coincided with first-wave feminism in Europe. Nordic women faced the same forms of sexism and limited opportunities as their European and American counterparts, but many of them had more success, due in part to quicker political and institutional support. In 1879 the Finnish Art Society awarded all of its prizes to women, and by 1890 there were more female than male students in its school. Finland was the first European country to give women the right to vote and the first country in the world to give them the right to stand for elections, both in 1906. In 1905, when the suffrage debate was raging, Schjerfbeck participated in a nationally sponsored exhibition of women artists in Helsinki. Such a thing would not happen in France until 1937 (and Schjerfbeck participated in that exhibition, too).<\/p>\n Finnish National Gallery, Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki\/Photograph by Yehia Eweis<\/p>\n Helene Schjerfbeck: The Door, 1884<\/p>\n Finland was especially keen to support artists, male or female, as sources of national pride. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century the country was under Russian control, and Schjerfbeck grew up amid an independence movement that increasingly used art to promote national identity. Over the course of her youth, a nation with no museums and few opportunities for artistic instruction established art schools for men and women, began sponsoring exhibitions of contemporary art, and purchased homegrown art from these exhibitions to build the Ateneum, still Finland\u2019s most important art museum. To give this budding national collection a historical foundation and to help fill the walls, the government paid Schjerfbeck and other Finnish artists to travel through Europe and copy Old Master paintings. Between 1892 and 1894 she went to Saint Petersburg, Vienna, and Florence to paint works by Hals, Holbein, ter Borch, Vel\u00e1zquez, Fra Angelico, Lippi, and Giorgione. These commissions were a capstone to her education and a testament to her expansive technical skill.<\/p>\n After her travels Schjerfbeck spent six years teaching painting and drawing in Helsinki before settling in Hyvink\u00e4\u00e4, a quiet railroad junction north of the city, in order to focus more deeply on her work and take care of her mother. As her career progressed, she let go of the naturalistic detail that came so easily in her youth and sought out new materials and techniques. She wrote to a friend: \u201cLet us avoid executing so precisely and exactly that our work closes the way instead of opening it. Let us imply.\u201d<\/p>\n Loosening and ambiguating her technique was another way of capturing her subjects indirectly, an approach that refused an over-determined finish or meaning. It is not uncommon for art prodigies to turn against their talent, rejecting verisimilitude for the challenge of radical methods and styles. Schjerfbeck made this turn to keep her work open, as if ever in progress.<\/p>\n She especially admired the \u201cdead tone\u201d of Degas\u2019s pastels, which he reportedly achieved by bleaching his pastel sticks in the sun and steaming his works with boiling water, perhaps to saturate their blunted hues. Degas\u2019s continual innovations were a model; she envisioned her work as similarly experimental and aggressive. Describing color like an enemy she needed to subdue, she told another friend: \u201cI too must kill the tone before it acquires strength, pure color is nothing but raw and weak to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
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