I'll be honest. The name Helene Schjerfbeck meant little to me until the Royal Academy announced a retrospective exhibition of her work and I even doubted if I'd find it that interesting. Sometimes I'm not even sure how I decide to go and see what I see. There's some kind of internal protocol in place but occasionally it seems to defy logic.
Occasionally it takes me to see things that prove to be a complete waste of time. Occasionally it gets me out of my comfort zone and rewards me with an afternoon of emotion and culture I could hardly have imagined. More often than not it falls between two stools and Helene Schjerfbeck at the Royal Academy was one of those occcasions.
That's not to say her work is bad. I liked it a lot. It's just to say it didn't blow me away. Which is quite a lot to ask of a painting anyway I suppose. Schjerfbeck was born in Finland (strictly speaking the Russian Empire which Helsinki was then part of) in 1862 and died in 1946. It was a great era for European art but Helsinki was hardly the centre of either Europe or the art world.
Her career spanned Impressionism, Cubism, and Abstraction and though Schjerfbeck's work did change to reflect the times, it changed very slowly. A glacial pace which seems suitable considering her Nordic heritage. There are nods, here and there, to Munch, Cezanne, and even Toulouse-Lautrec but, for the most part, Schjerfbeck is resolutely her own artist. There's almost a reclusive, hermit like, feel to her work as if those cold Finnish winters forced her indoors to consider her art and herself for hours on end. There's a sense, essentially, of an artist who simply liked to work. To paint.
Portrait of a Girl (St Ives) (c.1889)
Which is reflected in the fact that during her seven decades as an artist she produced more than a thousand works. Work that is celebrated elsewhere in Europe but has, thus far, made little impression in the UK. In fact, the RA's show was her first in the country since she exhibited her own work back in 1890 and her first ever solo exhibition on these shores.
Schjerfbeck started early, entering the Finnish Art Society's drawing school aged eleven (as their youngest ever student) before going on to study Dutch 17c genre painting at a private academy. In her late teens she moved to Paris on a state travel grant and there she studied at the Academie Colarossi. She was influenced by Jules Bastien Lepage (another new name on me) who, on seeing her work, remarked "these paintings have fine things and fierce things" and she made two visits to Cornwall in 1887/8 at the invitation of Austrian painter Marianne Preindlsberger (no, her neither) which inspired her magnificent, and kind, portrait of a girl in St Ives.
Sometimes Schjerfbeck confirmed to the kind of Victorian tastes that we find twee, cloying, and chocolate boxy. On other occasions her art could be quietly daring, questioning assumptions of what makes for suitable subject matter and experimenting with spatial ideas. The RA have made no attempt to focus on one of these styles more than the other and it's to their credit that they've not done so. It gives a more rounded, truer, idea of the work that Schjerfbeck produced.
Schjerfbeck started early, entering the Finnish Art Society's drawing school aged eleven (as their youngest ever student) before going on to study Dutch 17c genre painting at a private academy. In her late teens she moved to Paris on a state travel grant and there she studied at the Academie Colarossi. She was influenced by Jules Bastien Lepage (another new name on me) who, on seeing her work, remarked "these paintings have fine things and fierce things" and she made two visits to Cornwall in 1887/8 at the invitation of Austrian painter Marianne Preindlsberger (no, her neither) which inspired her magnificent, and kind, portrait of a girl in St Ives.
Sometimes Schjerfbeck confirmed to the kind of Victorian tastes that we find twee, cloying, and chocolate boxy. On other occasions her art could be quietly daring, questioning assumptions of what makes for suitable subject matter and experimenting with spatial ideas. The RA have made no attempt to focus on one of these styles more than the other and it's to their credit that they've not done so. It gives a more rounded, truer, idea of the work that Schjerfbeck produced.
Two Profiles (1881)
Portrait of Helena Westermarck (1884)
Even if it does mean that some of it can be skimmed over at an almost disrespectful clip. For the most part I've chosen to show the more interesting (to me at least) works. Two Profiles shows Preindlsberger and another friend, possibly Danish artist Annie Anker, and Helena Westermarck was a Finnish writer, artist, and another friend. More important than who they are, is the clear intention of Schjerfbeck to paint them with both honesty and love.
It was a methodology she could even apply to inanimate objects. Drying clothes. Or even a door. 1884's The Door's subject is as much the light that seeps into the room beneath the titular portal as it is the door itself. The fact that the scene was observed in the Tremalo Chapel in Pont-Aven, Brittany (a chapel that also inspired Gauguin) is, I think, of less interest than the fact that Schjerfbeck took such a modest sight as inspiration.
Clothes Drying (1883)
The Door (1884)
View of St Ives (1887)
It speaks of her confidence as an artist as well as her innate sense of aesthetic pleasure that a chapel door could provide as much inspiration, and produce equally exquisite results, as a very yellow, very sun dappled, view of St Ives with two young, well dressed, Victorian masters surveying the north Cornish coast and the intricate warren of cottages below.
Despite their surface differences each of these paintings has a sense of peace and that's something that comes through very strongly with repeated viewings of Schjerfbeck's work. There's no feeling of urgency. There's no haste. Instead there is, always, a calm and considered look at life. You can't help getting the impression (correctly or not) that, despite her quietude, Helene Schjerfbeck seemed to be very at ease with herself.
Back in Helsinki in the 1890s, Schjerfbeck would be sent on trips to Vienna, Florence, and St Petersburg in order to copy works by Hobein, Frans Hals, and Velazquez. Finnish collections lacked Old Masters and it seemed replicas would suffice until that situation changed. While helping the galleries of Finland, she was also able to give herself a deeper understanding of chiaroscuro and fire up her artistic imagination further by spending long hours plonked in front of works by Hans Holbein, Giorgione, and Fra Angelico.
Tapestry (1914-17)
In 1902, Schjerfbeck moved with her mother to the middling sized town of Hyvinkaa, about thirty miles north of Helsinki. There, despite staying in touch with the international art scene by reading magazines and chatting with friends, she began to experiment further. She'd lost interest in trying to impress the salon owners of Paris and was even less concerned with catering for the kind of nationalistic imagery that the Finnish art scene was craving.
Her work, hardly shouting in the first place, became even quieter, even more introspective. Hazy contours, pared down subject matter, and large areas of flatness gave her work an almost monastic quality. Tapestry is the oneiric outlier, looking more like a Munch work than one of Schjerfbeck's, but elsewhere she focused on scenes on glamour free domestication, of housework, of quiet contemplation, and of maternal respect. There's an almost filial sense of duty underpinning pious paintings like The Seamstress and At Home (Mother Sewing) which sit quite at odds with the arrogant, selfish behaviour of the dandy James Abbott McNeill Whistler whose portrait of his own mother appears to be the work that Schjerfbeck's own owes the greatest debt too.
The Seamstress (The Working Woman) (1905)
At Home (Mother Sewing) (1903)
When Schjerfbeck wasn't observing her mother (whom she was caring for at the time) carrying out chores, she was looking at herself in the mirror. You get the impression of a life so secluded there wasn't really much else to look at. The section of the exhibition dedicated to Schjerfbeck's self-portraits is the most comprehensive of the show and on first impression it seems like there's too many. You can't help thinking her legacy would have been served better by a little variation.
But when you consider her life and career as an artist you begin to gently disabuse yourself of that notion (when I write you, remember I mean I, I'm not sure where or when this affectation began). A series of self-portraits, and these go from a twenty-two year old to an eighty-three year old, is a journal of the ageing process, almost a memento mori, and it's difficult to view such a thing with anything other than gloomy resignation.
Self-portrait (1884-5)
Self-portrait (1895)
Self-portrait (1912)
Self-portrait with Black Mouth (1939)
Self-portrait with Red Spot (1944)
If you've looked through an old pile of photographs you'll be familiar with the twin sensations of nostalgia and a sense of loss for a past that can never be retrieved. Often a feeling of regret, lost youth and, more painful still, lost opportunities. Most of us look back and can't believe how good we once looked. We begrudge we never did more with our lives and with our looks. With a span of six decades, which even I'm yet to reach - and probably never will, these feelings become even starker.
From rosy cheeked ingenue to assured and confident young artist and on through middle age until the ravages of time begin to show and Schjerfbeck starts to appear almost as if an apparition of her former self. This series charts the weakening of the flesh as surely as it does the evolution of Schjerfbeck as an artist and the way she responded to developments in the wider art world.
The darkened backgrounds suggest the likes of Rembrandt remained with her as she passed through more traditional portraiture into vaguely Fauvist tropes in the 1910s and on to paintings that, though surely not Cubist in intent or design, are keenly aware of the style that Picasso and Braque pioneered over a century ago. It's as if Schjerfbeck could clearly see the debt that Picasso owed to Cezanne and wanted to somehow illustrate it. While, at the same time, remaining resolutely her own artist.
The Skier (English Girl) (1909)
Circus Girl (1906)
While Schjerfbeck's self-portraits are, primarily, made up of browns, blacks, and dark reds (muted muddy colours that seemed to express a sense of diffidence) those she made of others are far more colourful. Her sitters can even end up looking like circus clowns!
In the case of The Skier (English Girl) a bit too much so. Her sitters were family, friends, and local models rather than anyone particularly famous so it seems unlikely she was intending to offend. It seems to be more the case that capturing an accurate likeness was never her intent. Instead people's faces were merely springboards for Schjerfbeck to launch her experiments in colour from. She subscribed to Marie Claire and was fashion conscious enough to want to include zeitgeist friendly motifs of flappers and people dressed in gender neutral attire.
She wasn't even fussed if the titles were misleading. Her nephew Mans Schjerfbeck was a school teacher and not only was he not some professional motorist or racing driver but he neither owned a car nor even a driving license. It's uncertain, too, if Mabel Ellis (the English Girl) could ski or if her bright red cheeks (Schjerfbeck's bold experiments with colour can sometimes look a bit silly) simply made her look as if she'd applied, or over applied, the kind of sun protection one associates with Alpine slopes.
In the case of The Skier (English Girl) a bit too much so. Her sitters were family, friends, and local models rather than anyone particularly famous so it seems unlikely she was intending to offend. It seems to be more the case that capturing an accurate likeness was never her intent. Instead people's faces were merely springboards for Schjerfbeck to launch her experiments in colour from. She subscribed to Marie Claire and was fashion conscious enough to want to include zeitgeist friendly motifs of flappers and people dressed in gender neutral attire.
She wasn't even fussed if the titles were misleading. Her nephew Mans Schjerfbeck was a school teacher and not only was he not some professional motorist or racing driver but he neither owned a car nor even a driving license. It's uncertain, too, if Mabel Ellis (the English Girl) could ski or if her bright red cheeks (Schjerfbeck's bold experiments with colour can sometimes look a bit silly) simply made her look as if she'd applied, or over applied, the kind of sun protection one associates with Alpine slopes.
Mans Schjerfbeck (The Motorist) (1933)
Girl from California I (1919)
Girl from Eydtkuhne II (1927)
Nurse I (Kaija Lahtinen) (1943)
Schjerfbeck's titles often refer to 'types' rather than individuals. Motorists and skiers are joined by nurses and teachers. These are the people who would have made up Schjerfbeck's world it seems, and as she became an octogenarian, nurses became particularly prevalent. She spent large amounts of time being cared for in hospitals and nursing homes and though her body was weakening, and soon to give out on her, her desire to paint remained strong.
Paintings of nurses like Kaija Lahtinen, despite the obvious disparity in styles, seemed to see Schjerfbeck looking back at youth vicariously through those that still had it. Californian girls rub shoulders with those from Eydtkuhne (now Chernyshevskoye in the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia) as Schjerfbeck's surveys of colour and female life (Mans is a rare example of a male sitter in this show) became more expansive.
Nurse I (Kaija Lahtinen) (1943)
Girl from the Islands (1929)
Madonna de la Charite after El Greco (1941)
Portrait of a Girl in Blue and Brown (Inez) (1944)
Alarm (1935)
Almost as if Schjerfbeck's own reduced circumstances (and it seems her world, from her thirties onwards anyway, was not that large in the first place) seems to have caused her to journey further into her imagination. At the same time as she gently inched her art forwards in her final decades, she remembered and paid homage to the greats. The title of 1941's Madonna de la Charitie after El Greco isn't lying.
You can see, quite clearly, what she's taken from the Greek painter who worked from Toledo in Spain. The colour, the spectral feel of the figure, and the mood of devout service all shine through. I was lucky enough to visit an El Greco exhibition at the National Gallery many years ago and I must add, however, that Schjerfbeck's homage lacks the quite startling, almost other worldly, feel of an actual El Greco.
When it comes to colour, however, not many compare with El Greco (Matisse, Derain, Bonnard perhaps?) so we shouldn't hold that against Helene Schjerfbeck. Colour wasn't her main thing. Nor was still-life so the small selection in the final room proved an unexpected and pleasing coda to the whole experience. It also showed that Schjerfbeck was paying more attention to Cezanne than we may have at first assumed.
Still Life with Blackening Apples (1944)
Pumpkins (1935)
How'd you like them apples? What about those smashing pumpkins? Like Cezanne, Schjerfbeck painted fruit because it provided a great way to focus on tone, colour, and spatial relationships. The fact that a lemon or an orange tends to fidget less than a person was probably no hindrance either.
But fruit, like people, rots, decays, and displays signs of mortality so, again, we're in memento mori territory. In 1939 there were plans for Schjerfbeck to display her work in the United States but the outbreak of World War II saw to that, and the war hadn't long ended when, seven years later, Schjerfbeck died in a hotel on the Baltic coast of Sweden. A lifetime spent perusing mortality gone in an instant.
Ten years after her death Schjerfbeck was chosen to represent Finland at the 1956 Venice Biennale (in a pavilion designed by Alvar Aalto) but her originality. the fact she never belonged to any major art movement, and, I think most of all, her remoteness in a small town north of Helsinki meant that her art has remained very much on the periphery for the last seventy years.
I don't think this Royal Academy show will change much on that score (there were a decent amount of people there but certainly there was no need to book in advance) and, perhaps, that's the way Helene Schjerfbeck would have wanted it. After all, this is a woman who spent her seventieth birthday hiding in a cottage to avoid well-wishers. She doesn't need the money now so her art can speak for itself and it seems to me that it speaks softly and quietly but, at the same time, says something that's worth listening to.
I said at the start of this review that the exhibition had been a lukewarm experience at best. I'd given you a bit of a bum steer. In writing about the exhibition and in spending more time with Schjerfbeck's paintings I discovered a depth that was not apparent on first sight. That's because spending time with quiet people and quiet paintings can often unearth stories and ideas you hadn't been prepared for. That's why investment in people and in art is always worthwhile. The still waters that Helene Schjefbeck seemingly inhabited did, indeed, run deep. Bertta!
Red Apples (1915)
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