The Cold Comfort of a Helene Schjerfbeck Painting

In 1883, Schjerfbeck travelled to Brittany, where her first coup of ingenuity arrived, with paintings like “Clothes Drying” (1883) and “The Door” (1884). By filtering the grammar of naturalism through a fine mesh strainer until all that remains are skeletal forms and eerie compositional croppings, Schjerfbeck forces your eye toward an occluded or trivial detail. “The Door” shows a chapel interior with a closed door, a smudge of light, and no signs of life, except for the fact that the vanishing point is low enough to put us in the eyes of a child or a goat. In paintings, doors tend to function as little narrative machines, producing expectation or action. But Schjerfbeck’s is a narrative dead end. It’s as if she took one of Pieter Jansz. Saenredam’s empty church interiors and shook it until even the emptiness fell out.

What helped Schjerfbeck ascend from naturalism into the modernist ether might surprise you: Old Master paintings. In the eighteen-nineties, the Finnish Art Society sent Schjerfbeck to St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Florence to reproduce famous pieces for its collection. While reverse engineering works by Velázquez, Holbein, and Fra Angelico, she started to revise her techniques, fiddling with tempera, gouache, watercolor, and charcoal, and roughing up her surfaces. Puvis de Chavannes, whom she’d met in Paris, had been imitating the faded and matte look of fresco. Schjerfbeck also liked the way Degas bleached his pastels to deaden their tone. By pushing against the varnished, slick look of academic painting, and sapping its color into a chalky haze, she could pierce the viewer with a feeling of antiquity and melancholic potency. Once the patina of fresco entered her work, it never left.

In 1902, Schjerfbeck and her mother, Olga, moved to a one-bedroom flat in Hyvinkää, a small rail hub about thirty-five miles from Helsinki. The rustlings of Post-Impressionism hadn’t made an impact on Schjerfbeck when she was in Paris, but suddenly Cézanne, Gauguin, and Whistler crashed into her work, partly thanks to French art magazines. In Schjerfbeck’s homemade modernism, subject, color, and space all tend toward the minimal. With Whistleresque pieces like “The Seamstress (The Working Woman),” from 1905, and the almost scary “The School Girl II (Girl in Black),” from 1908, her palette constricts to pale blacks, grays, whites, and tawny browns. Rounded shapes are flattened or approximated with broad planes, so that clothes aren’t worn by the figures so much as blocked on, like shadows. Schjerfbeck’s mature style doesn’t just use vague forms but rigorously militates against detail. Details can be chatty and overeager; they populate the eye with information, rather than allowing the mind to invent it. “Let us imply,” Schjerfbeck said.

By the time Schjerfbeck had her solo show in Helsinki in 1917, two men had joined her camp. One was Gösta Stenman, who served as Schjerfbeck’s gallerist and local champion; the other was Einar Reuter, a young forester and artist, who became her confidant and crush. “Einar Reuter (Study in Brown)” (1915-18), painted during the honeymoon phase of their friendship, shows how Schjerfbeck, at the height of her powers, chose to paint someone she admired. It’s bleaker than you would hope. Schjerfbeck uses the rough weave of the canvas to turn Reuter into a husk of himself, with an empty pair of brown eyes and a mangled ear. Don’t mistake the depressive air for his own. Schjerfbeck’s portraits are not about showing you a person’s appearance and essence but, rather, about taking them away. Her anti-portraits, at their best and most psychologically lacerating, remind you how painful it can be not to have access to another person’s inner life.