Helene Schjerfbeck enters the Metropolitan Museum and Orsay

19/11/23 - Acquisitions - New York, The Metropolitan Museum and Paris, Musée d’Orsay - Hitherto absent from American and French museum collections, the Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck has entered the Metropolitan Museum and the Musée d’Orsay at almost the same time. The New York museum purchased a portrait (ill. 1) from the Åmells gallery in Stockholm, which recently reappeared on the Finnish art market [1]. This title takes up the artist’s initial mention of the work in a letter to her friend and mentor the painter Einar Reuter on September 26, 1920, a few months after she had announced her intention to depict Sigrid Nyberg in "a black floral lace shawl". As already mentioned in the news item of 2016 devoted to the artist’s Self-portrait acquired by the Ateneum Art Museum (see news item of 4/22/16), Helene Schjerfbeck moved through several styles, her initially naturalistic figurative painting evolving towards an ever more stripped-down form, close to synthetism and then expressionism. The main subject, the black shawl and the bust it envelops, are here an assemblage of geometric shapes, opaque flat tints and thin juxtaposed layers of paint suggesting the transparency of lace. More moderately stylized, the face is reduced to three main elements: the bony line of the lower jaw, oversized eye sockets and a thick red mouth. As Leena Athola-Moorhouse, Chief Curator of the Ateneum Museum, points out in the catalog of the retrospective devoted to the artist there in 2012, a second version of this composition was painted by the artist in 1944, Gipsy (Zigenarflickan), a gouache, watercolor and oil on paper in a private collection. This procedure is not uncommon in the artist’s work, as he liked to produce several versions of the same painting one or two decades apart. Leena Athola-Moorhouse also points out that Sigrid Nyberg was the model for other paintings from this period, such as Black Woman in 1929 and Woman with Black Hair or Heart Disease in 1930, also in…