‘Finland’s Munch’: the unnerving art of Helene Schjerfbeck
One of her country’s most celebrated artists, Schjerfbeck is little known in the UK, but now her singular paintings will seen in a major exhibition
In the seaside town of Ekenäs, south-west of Helsinki, there is a name that appears wherever you go: Helene Schjerfbeck. A street lined with early-19th-century weatherboard houses is named after her, and at the Helene Schjerfbeck cafe they serve lingonberry and bitter chocolate cake with the initials HS picked out in sugar. An actor, Anne Ingman, has made it her vocation to impersonate Schjerfbeck in a floor-length black costume with a battered leather handbag and a jade brooch like one Schjerfbeck wore. She guides visitors through a park where Schjerfbeck painted, tells stories about her life and points out a modern artwork by AK Dolven, a bell high in the oak trees that can be heard across town. Send not to know for whom the bell tolls: it is another homage to Schjerfbeck.
In Helsinki’s Ateneum, Finland’s national gallery, Schjerfbeck (1862-1946) has been, through the latter part of her lifetime and since her death, one of Finland’s best-loved artists. But in the UK she remains little known. This month, at the Royal Academy, a solo show of 65 paintings (she made more than 1,000 in her lifetime) is about to put this right. Schjerfbeck started in the style of French naturalists such as Jules Bastien-Lepage before becoming an early modernist. She is sometimes described, according to the Ateneum’s chief curator and co-curator of the Royal Academy show Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff, as “Finland’s Munch”, though at the same time she is “individual – distinctively herself” and not as histrionic as her Norwegian counterpart. Royal Academy assistant curator Rebecca Bray suggests that through the “intimacy and interiority” in her work, she has more in common with the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, sharing his melancholic grace.