"After six centuries of Swedish rule, and more than a hundred years as a grand duchy of Russia, your nation is finally on the brink of independence. To the south, Europe is tearing itself to bits in the First World War; to the east, there's the Russian Revolution. Most of the art you've seen at this point is either second-rate or beats a patriotic drum-lakes and forests and scenes from the "Kalevala," a national epic featuring some cosmic eggs and a drowned girl."
"The Helsinki exhibition drew around four thousand visitors, a record for the Finnish art world at the time. A local art historian, in his review, compared Schjerfbeck to Titian, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, and Beethoven. Notice the scramble of names there: a Renaissance master, two very different Baroque titans, and a German composer. The art historian was grasping at straws. A century later, we still are."
In 1917 Finland neared independence amid World War I and the Russian Revolution. Much contemporary Finnish art emphasized patriotic landscapes and Kalevala scenes. Helene Schjerfbeck painted spare, melancholic portraits and interior scenes with taut flesh and cold, luminous eyes. A Helsinki retrospective drew unprecedented visitors and prompted comparisons to old masters and Beethoven, illustrating difficulty of categorization. Schjerfbeck's work resists easy placement within Finnish golden-age painting or mainstream histories of modernism. The restrained, unsettling quality of her portraits creates a modernist effect that continues to surprise and challenge viewers. Her presence complicates simple narratives about national art and modernism.
Read at The New Yorker
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