Helene Schjerfbeck

Helene Schjerfbeck (Helsinki, July 10th, 1862 - January 28th, 1946,) was a painter Finnish.

Child prodigy, Helene Schjerfbeck continues his academic formation in Paris, in the rare free workshops opened to the women. With the Académie Colarossi it obtains a medal in 1882. It exposes to the Parisian living room of the Champs Elysées in 1882 & 1884. In 1889, always to Paris it presents a work during the World Fair. She chooses then a Naturalisme which a great technical virtuosity serves being worth to him of early successes. This period is marked by many voyages: Brittany, England, Russia, Italy. At the end of the XIXe century, in Finland fighting for independence, its refusal of the national Romanticism whose Akseli Gallen-Kallela took the head, marginalizes it. A fragile health since its childhood then leads it to settle to about fifty kilometers of Helsinki of which it will remain absent during fifteen years. It is in this desired insulation that it works out its own modern language, purifying its writing on the basis of realism to which it remains faithful. This pictorial asceticism is based on an attention with its environment, painting its entourage, the local factory-girls or later the nurses of the Sanatorium, the landscapes and the dead natural intimate which are like as many meditations echoing the Autoportrait S where at the end of its life it tracks progress of the age, the illness and dead approaching. She dies in the sanatorium of Saltsjöbaden in Sweden, country where she had taken refuge at the time of the Guerre of Continuation, second armed conflict opposing Finland and the USSR.

Exposure

From October 20th, 2007 to January 13rd, 2008, Paris, museum of Modern art of the town of Paris.

Images

For self-portrait of 1915, to see seeing For paintings of 1904 and 1880, to see

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