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To be sold at Uppsala Auktionskammare’s Important Sale Week 12 – 15 December 2023
Lot 707 Helene Schjerfbeck (Finland 1862‑1946). ”Kvinnan på fyrtio år” (The Woman of Forty Years). Signed with monogram HS. Oil on canvas, 50 x 42 cm.
Executed in 1939.
5.000.000 – 7.000.000 SEK
€ 436.000 – 611.000
The collection of art dealer Gösta Stenman (1888‑1947), inv. no. 1903.
An important Swedish private collection.
Gösta Stenmans konsthandel, Stockholm, ”Helene Schjerfbecks U.S.A.-kollektion”, 1939, cat. no. 97.
Gösta Stenmans konsthandel, Stockholm, ”Helene Schjerfbeck-Hyllningsutställning”, 1942, cat. no. 74.
Gösta Stenmans konsthandel, Stockholm, ”Helene Schjerfbeck”, 1958, cat. no. 81.
Gösta Stenmans konsthandel, Stockholm, ”Helene Schjerfbeck-Hyllningsutställning 1862‑1946”, 1962, cat. no. 83.
Ekenäs museum, Tammisaaren Museo, ”Helene Schjerfbeck-retrospektiv konstutställning”, 1 July-27 July 1984, cat. no. 44.
Åmells konsthandel, Stockholm, ”Helene Schjerfbeck”, 5-19 October 2013.
Gotthard Johansson, Helene Schjerfbecks konst, 1940, illustrated.
H. Ahtela, Helena Schjerfbeck, 1953, p. 345, no. 835 in the catalogue, titled “Kvinnan på fyrtio år”.
Åmells konsthandel, Helene Schjerfbeck, 2013, p. 50, illustrated p. 51.
Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946) is one of Finland’s greatest artists. She was born in Helsinki into a Finnish-Swedish family and enrolled at the Finnish Artists’ Association’s drawing school, now the Finnish Academy of Arts, when she was only eleven years old. She received a premium and travel grant and was able to travel to Paris, as an 18-year-old by steamboat in 1880, to further her education. During the next ten years, she painted in Paris, in Brittany and in St. Ives in Cornwall in England and occasionally traveled home to Finland, preferably in the summer. She exhibited three times at the French Salon de Paris, the most important art exhibition in the world for contemporary art around the turn of the century in 1900. The first time in 1883 she brought the large painting ”Fête de Juifs” (Lövhyddohögtid). She had the painting rolled up under her arm on the train on the newly built railway through the Baltic countries. In 1884, she had appeased the jury with the nearly two-metre-high painting ”Burial in Brittany” (Begravning i Bretagne), and received a very positive note from the jury. The third time at the Salon in 1888, she showed the ”Convalescent” (Konvalescenten), which became her definitive artistic recognition and breakthrough, and was also awarded with a medal. At home in Helsinki, she was forced for financial reasons to teach at her old drawing school at Ateneum in the 1890s. The political climate in Finland hardened. Since 1809, Finland was a grand duchy within the Russian Empire with great independence, but before the turn of the century in 1900, Russia’s influence became stronger. A strong national movement also emerged within the art world, and Helene Schjerfbeck’s French education and teaching methods did not fit in there. She still refused to change. She resigned and moved to Hyvinkää in 1902, where she further developed her modernist style.
In the spring of 1917, Helene Schjerfbeck visited Helsinki for the first time after 15 years in Hyvinkää. In Ateneum’s collections, she saw some paintings by the artists Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin that captivated her. In September, her first solo exhibition was held which showed her new modern style. Unfortunately, she could not go back to the capital to see it because the times were too troubled. Through the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, Finland was able to enforce its full independence, manifested on December 6, 1917. From that day on, it became Finland’s National Day. Helene Schjerfbeck, however, continued to develop her reductive modern painting language in her own peaceful environment, where she lived in Hyvinkää until 1925 and then without major disturbance in Tammisaari. She did miss the community of friends in Helsinki and seeing original works of art. But she largely replaced the loss with inspiring correspondence, books and subscriptions to illustrated art magazines. The ones she preferred were the English The Studio and the French L’Amour de l’Art.
The painting ”Kvinnan på fyrtio år” (The Woman of Forty Years) was painted in 1939 using the typical method developed by Helene Schjerfbeck in the early 20th century. No exact details, some features elevated and exaggerated. It is signed with the monogram HS in a golden yellow ocher colour against the blue background and sits on the model’s shoulder on the right in the painting. No punctuation marks, periods or other distractions. But different. The artist’s choice of choosing a placement and contrasting colour as an odd accent gives the painting yet another special feature typical for Helene Schjerfbeck. There are traces of the golden yellow colour also in an angled stroke to the upper right in the background, followed by a hinted continuation in the upper left part. It is a marking of the interior’s space and demarcation and puts the model in the center of the image.
The woman’s black hair, black narrow eyes and black-marked nose and mouth give the painting a special aura, echoing the blackness of the admired French artist Georges Rouault, but without his softness. There is a strong contrast to the harshness of the black through the dress’s gentle old pink tone and impressionistic brushwork. An important contrasting expression of both colour and form in Schjerfbeck’s artistry. The face is shaped like a mask, an impression from Japanese Noh-plays, and appears to be mounted on a neck pillar of a block-like nature. Schjerfbeck is always influenced by artists close to her heart, such as Paul Cézanne and his geometric teachings, as well as Picasso’s blue and pink periods. But she managed her French and Continental heritage entirely with her own primal vigor and set out on unexplored ground. She has become an important source of inspiration for many young artists.
Helene Schjerfbeck saw none of her exhibitions, not in Helsinki nor in Stenman’s art salon at Storgatan 10 in Stockholm, where her art dealer and gallerist Gösta Stenman organized them. She did not always understand what was written about her in Finnish newspapers because of her lack of knowledge of the Finnish language. Swedish was her mother tongue, as in many Finnish-Swedish families. She expressed sadness in her 50s that she had never learned to speak, read or write Finnish.
Her second solo exhibition took place in 1937 when she was 75 years old. Gösta Stenman organized it in his gallery in Stockholm and it was a huge success. She was embarrassed and proud at the same time, but it was out of the question that she would come to Stockholm. ”Kvinnan på fyrtio år” was finished just in time for Stenman’s art salon’s exhibition ”Helene Schjerfbecks U.S.A. collection” including 120 works, where it had number 97. Due to the Second World War, Stenman had to change his plans to send the entire collection on tour abroad. Instead, he showed it in Stockholm and parts of it in other places in Sweden.
In 1939, the Finnish Winter War broke out. Helene Schjerfbeck, who then lived in the coastal town of Tammisaari, was for safety reasons evacuated in November to a farm inland. By then she had finished ”Kvinnan på fyrtio år”. She wrote to Einar Reuter in mid-July 1939 from Tammisaari that she ”had one hour of modelling the other day, the first time.” And a little further on in the letter that ”The model is a 40-year-old woman who had looked good”. Helene Schjerfbeck is not much for guarding her words in her letters to close friends. The comment that the woman ”had looked good” is enough for us to understand her starting point for this fascinating portrait. She evokes the strength of the model’s age through the blackness and softness of her in the pink blouse. At the end of July she writes another comment to Reuter: ”All the figures in Hyvinkää expressed more feelings than the Tammisaari model, they have big curved noses and black hair.” This description of the model for ”Kvinnan på fyrtio år” is right in many ways. The woman shows strength and expresses survival more than sensitivity. In a painting from the same period depicting another model, ”The Stubborn Girl”, we recognise the black almond-shaped narrow eyes and the face shaped like a mask, as seen in ”Kvinnan på fyrtio år”. But here she has built the image in a different way. Schjerfbeck saw the model straight on and shaped the painting’s face with the contrasts of dark versus light. Half of the face shows a light surface against a dark background, the other half a dark shade against a light background. The kinship between the paintings is there, like a kind little sister and her strict older sister.
Many of Helene Schjerfbeck’s paintings from the late 1930s onwards have a painting language with a brutal consistency that places her in the same expressionist, unconditional and uncompromising circle as, for example, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. They all painted extremely expressive portraits where the emotions of reality were included in the interpretation of the model.
Helene Schjerfbeck wrote many letters during her lifetime. There are thousands of letters preserved in her beautiful handwriting, several of them written to her so-called painter sisters and especially to Helena Westermarck (1853-1938). The largest collection is in the archive collections at Åbo Akademi’s library. Another frequent letter recipient was her friend Einar Reuter and later biographer with the pseudonym H. Ahtela. He preserved all correspondence from her during the years 1915 to her last active year in 1945. The very last lines of the letter of January 3, 1946 read that ”I lie my day” (Jag ligger min dag). She sent them from Saltsjöbaden in Sweden, where Stenman had evacuated her to avoid the bombings in Finland. Twenty days later she passed away.
Text by: Lena Holger, author and art historian, former chief curator of the National Museum of Fine Art in Stockholm.