A Valentine for Ms. Schjerfbeck

Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946), Yellow Roses, circa 1880s, Oil on Canvas, 10 by 11 ½ in., Private Collection

The Convalescent, 1888, considered a hidden self-portrait, Oil on canvas, 36.2 by 42.1 in., Atenium Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki

Dancing Shoes, 1882, Oil on Canvas, 21 3/4 by 25 1/2 in., sold for $4.3 million in 2008 at Sotheby's London, Private Collection

Picking Bluebells, 1880s, Oil on Canvas

The Nursemaid, 1880s, Oil on Canvas

Portrait of a Girl, 1880s, Oil on Canvas

Drying Laundry, 1883, Oil on Canvas, 38.5 by 54 in., Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki

Self-Portrait, 1884-85, Oil on Canvas, 19.69 by 16.4 in., Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki

Self-Portrait with Red Spot, 1944, Oil on Canvas, 17.7 by 14.52 in., Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki

Helene Schjerfbeck, undated photo

Helene Schjerfbeck paints at her home in Tammisaari in 1937

In a private art collection somewhere resides a quiet little oil painting on canvas of two wilting yellow roses in a drinking glass.  It measures just 10 by 11 ½ inches.  And it is one of the world’s greatest paintings.

In its apparent simplicity, this little work contains all the deep secrets of the unfathomable art of oil painting and loyally refuses to yield them to those who seek the same perfection in their own work.   Don’t ask me to explain why this is so.  I can’t.  And I’m certain the painter couldn’t have either.

The creator of this masterpiece was the iconic Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946), whose rise to fame in her later years and after her death was no doubt aided by a life filled with “illness, loneliness, pain and suffering,” as summarized by one chronicler, a surefire recipe for public adoration of a gifted artist.  This shy, introverted painter left behind about 1,000 paintings and 2,000 letters, so there is a lot of material for scholars to ponder over.

An art critic for The Independent of London, in a review of a big Schjerfbeck exhibit in The Hague, Hamburg and Paris in 2007, wrote, “Imagine the life of Frida Kahlo yoked to the eye of Edvard Munch, and you’ll begin to get the measure of this oeuvre.”  Kahlo endured a similar life of physical pain, but she confronted and publicly glorified her infirmities in her artwork.  Schjerfbeck on the other hand, became reclusive and introverted, spending most of her life isolated in small towns in Finland and Sweden.

Schjerfbeck wrote to a friend in 1917 that she hadn’t known one day of good health in 50 years.  “One gets so tired of fighting,” she wrote.   She somehow managed to complete all those paintings, despite sometimes being able to paint only one or two hours a day.  Her self-described lifelong illnesses are not identified in any of the online articles I read.

Here’s a brief rundown on some of the troubles she suffered early on that may have contributed to her shy and reclusive personality.  When she was four years old, she fell on a staircase, breaking her left hip and leaving her with a permanent limp.  Her twin siblings (a brother and sister), died at the age of one, her elder sister died shortly before her birth, and when she was 13 she lost her father to tuberculosis, causing her mother to take on boarders for a time to make ends meet.  A brother, Magnus, survived and grew up to be an architect.  Because of her poor health she was home-schooled in early childhood.  She was “silent and gloomy.”  As an adult, Schjerfbeck spent many years caring for her ill mother, a frequent model for her paintings, who died in 1923. 

Considered a child prodigy for her drawing skill at a very young age, Schjerfbeck was admitted to the Finnish Art Society Drawing School when she was only 11 years old.  In 1880, when she was 18, she went off to Paris to study in the academies, with Léon Bonnat and Gustave Courtois, among others.  During the 1880s, she spent time painting at various art colonies, including Concarneau and Pont-Aven in Brittany, and St. Ives in Cornwall. Her work in that decade is very much influenced by the plein-air naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage and others, including Stanhope Forbes.  And that’s the work of hers that I really love.

In 1884 she had her own studio in Paris, which she longed for again in her final years, and she lamented losing her drawing ability as she settled into her expressionistic, modernist phase by 1905, which she pursued for the remainder of her life.  In a 1914 letter to a friend, she complained that "I don't know how to draw anymore."  Her later figurative work is marked by simplified abstractions of line, light and color.

Schjerfbeck had moved back to Finland around 1890, due to her declining health, and began teaching regularly at the Art Society drawing school.  But in 1902, she became too ill to teach and resigned her position.  She kept in touch with the European art scene through black-and-white reproductions in art magazines and books, which artist friends sent her, leading to her experimentation with line, color and abstract shapes from magazine illustrations. When no models were available, she would use photographic portraits as a source of inspiration for her modernist works.  It is noted that living with her mother in a predominately female community gave Schjerfbeck the artistic freedom she desired.  She once mentioned that Degas, also, could only settle down to paint by disdaining society.

In 1913, Schjerfbeck met the art dealer Gösta Stenman, who arranged numerous exhibits of her work and began paying her a monthly salary in 1938.  She continued to paint actively, even during her last years.  During her final two years of life she lived in the Saltsjöbaden spa hotel in Sweden, where she created her now-famous “final burst” of reductive self-portraits.

                           

Schjerfbeck painted at least 36 self-portraits throughout her career.  These works became increasingly abstract and analytical, eventually recording her physical deterioration, ending with ghostlike skull imagery.  The later self-portraits, created during the Second World War are “haunting and cartoonish,” in one critic’s view.  Schjerfbeck is said to be best known today for those self-portraits, painted from 1878 to 1945. “Now that I so seldom have the strength to paint, I’ve started on a self-portrait,” she wrote to a friend in 1921. “This way the model is always available, although it isn’t at all pleasant to see oneself.”

Writing in an online journal of 19^th Century art at the time of the European tour of Schjerfbeck’s work, the Belgian art historian Marjan Sterckx offered an analysis of the painter’s late modernist philosophy and technique:   She attained an expressive imagery through the reduction of the narrative and her color palette, by leaving out more and more detail, and working with fields and two dimensions, without abandoning depth. Schjerfbeck herself wrote: "A work of art always lacks the last few details; the finished is dead."  In literature, she also saw confirmation of the principle that "we do not [need to] list every detail; a hint brings us closer to the truth."  So she went in search of the essence and the power of emptiness through the simplification and blurring of pictorial elements, and the omission of the unnecessary. Helene Schjerfbeck tried to express as much as possible with as little as possible.

Her conviction that “the finished is dead” is apparent in the way she treated her exquisite painting of the two wilting yellow roses.  It is far from finished in the photographic sense, but it is “finished” to absolute perfection.  From her vantage point, she saw clearly and felt intensely what nature had created, and that was that.  She seemed incredibly perceptive as to the right time to stop working on a painting before killing it with narcoleptic “finish,” even in her most realistic paintings from the 1880s.  Whenever you see most painters’ photographic record of the creation of a painting, the best image is invariably the one shown one or two stages before the completed work.  Try to tell that to all of today’s photographic finishers!

Riita Konttinen, a Finnish art historian, writes:  Schjerfbeck's own way of working was very slow; she painted and erased her works many times in order to achieve the effect that she wanted. She was very self-critical and never felt that she had achieved what she was really aiming at. "One should paint with feelers, not with brushes and fingers", she once remarked.  But Helene Schjerfbeck was not so ethereal and incorporeal as people have often fondly imagined, and her work is not mere aestheticising but an intensive exploration of the depths of existence, an exploration tied in many ways to general developments in her era and in art.

Schjerfbeck never married.  She had a brief engagement to an unnamed English artist she met in an art colony in Brittany, but eliminated any traces of that relationship.  Konttinen writes that Schjerfbeck’s fiancé broke off the engagement because his relatives suspected that her hip problem was of a tubercular nature.  And she had a long-term unrequited friendship with the lumberjack, writer and artist Einar Reuter, who wrote the first biography of her in 1917.  “They corresponded regularly,” Konttinen writes, “and Reuter adopted a caring attitude towards her; Schjerfbeck for her part became deeply attached to him. The news of Reuter's engagement to the Swede Tyra Arp in 1919 came as a shock to her, as she was afraid of losing this friendship. But Reuter and Schjerfbeck continued to be close friends.” Konttinen surmises that having no children seems to have been particularly sad for Schjerfbeck, who later thought of adopting a child, but her environment was hostile to that notion.

So that’s my funny valentine to Ms. Schjerfbeck for creating one of my favorite works of art.  And that’s my Valentine’s Day story for all you lovelorn painters out there.  You will just have to face the fact that, like Schjerfbeck, painting is going to be your only true love.

Spooner of Nottingham

Arthur Spooner (1873-1962), Summer, ca. 1930, Oil on Canvas, 38 by 48 in., Private Collection

The Goose Fair, Nottingham, 1926, Oil on Canvas, 72.01 by 96.5 in., Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery

Apple Fallings, Oil on Canvas, 36 by 36 in., Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery

Nymph in a Wood, Oil on Canvas, 42.13 x 20.28 in., Private Collection

Freshwater Bay, Oil on Canvas, 27 by 32.1 in., Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, Lancashire, England

Sulby Glen and Snaefell, Oil on Canvas, 16 x 25 in., Private Collection

One of 59 demonstration sketches acquired by one of Spooner's students, Oil on Canvas Board, 12.5 by 15 in.

The lazy days of summer in Nottingham, England, circa 1930, in the sun-dappled vestigial environs of the legendary Sherwood Forest, was the setting for an exceptionally vivid recumbent figure painting by Arthur Spooner (1873-1962). 

It caught my eye in an auction catalog for British and Irish Art, one of my favorite artist groupings.  I soon discovered that it is just one of many memorable paintings created by this native of Nottingham, who stayed close to home all his life to carve out a successful painting career, which earned him celebrity status among the locals.  And bully for Spooner that he was able to cleverly conceal both hands and arrange the arms decoratively in a convincing full-figure pose.  Depicting those integral appendages is often a painting’s downfall if they are poorly executed. 

The woman posing languorously on a deck chair was none other than the artist’s favorite model – his wife.  Perhaps the empty deck chair beside her was reserved for Spooner at break time.  A shaggy dog is superbly added to the composition as well.   I’m told it was their dog and not the neighbor’s, or a stray.  How could I possibly confirm that, or answer all the other questions painters routinely have about the creation of a painting, such as what exactly is that light-struck background imagery behind her head?  Perhaps that mystery is solved when viewing the original painting.  I’m sadly imbued with the grade-school admonition, “We never guess, we look it up,” but you can’t look up everything you find interesting or important to relate on the Internet, can you?  One has to move on.

By the way, lots of married painters in the old days were fortunate to have spouses willing to pose for them.  If there were kids in the equation, that was even better, because the little tykes were obliged to pose for daddy’s or mommy’s pictures as well, especially if they were girls.  This was before Nintendo and Pokemon, remember.  The Boston Impressionist Frank Benson would have remained just another obscure but talented painter if he hadn’t had three lovely daughters to depict on canvas.  And it was a great blessing for the world of art that he did, because the girls posed during summer vacations for some of the most beautiful paintings ever created.  Benson’s son got a little posing time as well.  I’m not sure married painters today can count on their spouses and children posing for them, since easel painting is no longer front page news and everybody is now advised to “do their own thing.”  Posing for pictures that nobody cares about is not high on anybody’s list of things to do in this digital age.

Spooner and his wife had two children, a boy and a girl, and I’m certain he made use of them for pictorial purposes when they were youngsters.  A portrait of his daughter, Edyth, apparently painted when she moved back home after her divorce, was added not long ago to the collection of Nottingham Castle Gallery, which houses Spooner’s magnum opus, The Goose Fair, Nottingham, painted in 1926. The work shows one of the last times the festival, which dates back to the 13^th Century, was held in the city center, before it was moved to the outskirts of Nottingham.  Spooner’s portrayal of a bustling crowd at dusk was painted from his rooftop studio, which overlooked the town square. The prominent clown figure in the painting is a self-portrait.

The painting was purchased at auction in 2004 by Sir Harry Djanogly, a wealthy textile manufacturer and knighted philanthropist, for the “staggering” price of $401,048, after a bidding battle to acquire the painting. It is now on long-term loan to the castle gallery. According to the BBC online, the work is said to be a visitor favorite and Nottingham's equivalent to the Louvre's Mona Lisa.  Sarah Skinner, Keeper of Art at Nottingham Castle, said the oil painting brings a “sense of noise” to a very quiet space as well as the smells of frying onions, mushy peas and candy floss.  "People like the picture for what it showed then [compared with] now."

I’m not crazy about paintings of crowd scenes in general.  The reportage tends to overwhelm the pictorial, unless it is a crowd scene in a carefully composed history painting. The phenomenal Russian painter Ilya Repin (1844-1930), for example, created several gigantic history paintings teeming with people that are supremely artistic.  But I think Spooner did a remarkable job composing what must have been a very chaotic street scene as witnessed from his studio above.  I can understand how it would be a real crowd pleaser.

Spooner studied painting in the traditional Victorian manner at Nottingham School of Art, but went on to paint in the British Impressionist style, which is marked by hazy, atmospheric light effects and subdued color.  He is best known for painting landscapes, horses, nudes, and flattering portraits of Nottingham’s notable citizens.

Spooner taught landscape and figurative painting at his alma mater in the early 20th Century and was one of the founding members of the Nottingham Society of Artists, serving as its President from 1946-62.  He exhibited locally and nationally at the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of British Artists and other important venues in England.

One element of Spooner’s teaching method might interest all art students who get hold of their master’s doodles by hook or crook.  Spooner required a pupil he instructed in the 1950s to attend class with a 12.5 by 15 in. primed canvas board, upon which he would demonstrate painting techniques.  A collection of 59 of these studies and sketches compiled by the pupil, ranging from seascapes to landscapes, horses and portraits, was put up for auction in 2012 at Bonhams Chester.  Bonhams said the collection provided “a rare opportunity to purchase works by an artist considered in Nottingham to be a local hero and very fine painter.”  One Internet art source reports that the collection was sold for $4,263, short of its estimate of $4,400-5,800.  Some of Spooner’s demonstration sketches look pretty good, and you can view a few of them online.  No painter today would ever think of giving away a demonstration painting, which is usually purchased by an audience member as soon as the applause dies down.

As a member of the Royal Society of British Artists, Spooner was a popular figure and much feted during his lifetime.  And he was a major artistic influence on the city of Nottingham through his teaching and painting career.  Apart from painting vacations abroad, his whole career was spent in Nottingham.  Spooner was unable to work in his final years because of failing eyesight, and he died in Nottingham in 1962 at the age of 89.

In looking into Spooner’s career, I wondered if he was related to William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930), the Oxford don who is said to have humorously mixed up syllables on occasion, giving rise to the word “spoonerism” to describe that habit.  I couldn’t find any common ancestry.  But having dressed himself in that clown costume for his most-famous painting, it is possible Arthur Spooner would have been amused by W.A. Spooner’s comical legacy.  At any rate, the Spooner name is associated with some very fine art, not nonsense wordplay, in the fabled land of Robin Hood and his Merry Men.

Valentin Serov's Portraits

Valentin Serov (Russian,1865–1911), Portrait of Yevdokia Sergeyevna Morozova, 1908, Oil on Canvas,  44.9 by 29.5 in., Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia

Portrait of Princess Olga Orlova, 1911, Oil on Canvas, 93.7 by 63 in., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Portrait of Princess Olga Orlova, Detail

Portrait of Henrietta Leopoldovna Girshman, 1907, Tempera on Canvas, 55.11 by 55.11 in., Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Portrait of Henrietta Girshman, 1906, Tempera on cardboard, 39 by 26.8 in., Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Portrait of Mara Konstantinovna Oliv, 1895, Oil on Canvas, 34.6 by 26.9 in., State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Portrait of Maria Akimova, 1908, Oil on Canvas, 30.3 by 24.4 in., The Picture Gallery of Armenia, Erevan, Armenia

Model with Her Hair Down, 1899, Watercolor and White on Paper, mounted on Cardboard, 52.4 x 35.5 cm., Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

It is truly astonishing to me that the Art Nouveau aesthetic, which influenced or inspired the greatest portrait painters of the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, is passé for portrait painters of the early 21^st Century. Despite paying homage to Sargent, Zorn, Sorolla, Boldini, Kroyer, Klimt and many others, today’s portrait painters avoid the flowing line, the elegance of pose and the expressive feeling those masters captured on canvas.  All that really matters in the business these days is high-definition photographic accuracy.

The accepted conventions of the past are now generally ignored or poorly executed -- a tilt of the head, which is turned in opposition to the torso; a facial expression of any kind, coordinated sensitively with all the mobile features (eyes, eyebrows, nose and mouth); a pronounced placement of the pose, whether linear or curvilinear, existing in dominant harmony with the sitter’s environment.

I often reflect on this inexplicable rejection of grace and beauty by today’s hard-working painters when an unfamiliar portrait by one of the past masters of the art catches my eye as I ride herd on the vast Internet art range, a poor metaphor that reminds me of a line from a sentimental cowboy song written by Gene Autry:  “Riding down the canyon to watch the sun go down, a picture that no artist e’er could paint.”  The “Singing Cowboy” sure got that one right.

But an artist was capable of creating the painting I recently came across, and in such a fabulous manner that Mother Nature herself would bow her head in humble submission.  It was the 1908 portrait of Yevdokia Sergeyevna Morozova, wife of the art collector Ivan Morozova, and it was created by one of Russia’s greatest painters, Valentin Serov (1865-1911).

After admiring the beautiful, vivacious face of this woman, I noted the graceful position of her right forearm and skillfully cropped hand resting upon her bosom.  Perhaps this gesture is too theatrical for today’s cynical world, but Serov found it an effective way to add rhythmic movement to a pose, and he used variations of it for some of his most important portraits of women, as well as for a couple of his famous portraits of men.

It is a terrific way to handle painting of those appendages.   Faces are a snap by comparison, and clients are satisfied if you simply copy a flattering photograph exactly.  But if you don’t give the arms at least a slight bend at the elbow, you are better off keeping them covered with sleeves.  And if you don’t give the hands a bit of a turn  or something to do, they are better off left in pockets than lying dead on the arms of a chair.  Also, depicting one hand is usually enough for any portrait.  Serov knew that.  So should everybody else.

Serov was trained as a realist, but he is said to have worked very hard to achieve a look of “freedom, artistry, effortless ease” in his paintings, eschewing any hint of photographic precision in the finished portrait.  “He painted his portraits slowly, sometimes agonizingly,” wrote one critic.  Serov himself said, “Each portrait is for me an illness.”

I wonder if today’s digital toilers, working under the intense glare of LED lights day and night, are able to empathize with Serov, who once said:

Any human face is so complex and so unique that you can always find in it traits worthy of portrayal, be they good or bad.  For my part, each time I appraise a person’s face I am inspired, you might even say carried away, not by his or her outer aspect, which is often trivial, but by [the] characterization it can be given on canvas.  That is why I am accused of sometimes having my portraits look like caricatures.”

And as often happens when a painter like Serov is “in the zone” seeking some primal truth about the sitter, the resulting portrait often ends up being as much about the emotional state of the painter as that of the sitter.

Dmitry Sarabyanov, the author of a brilliant essay on Serov in a 1982 catalog of the artist’s work published by Aurora Art Publishers, St. Petersburg, Russia, suggests that:

In Serov’s world the subject of spiritual beauty in man was one of the most controversial.  In the 1870s and 1880s [Ilya] Repin saw his ideal in real persons.  Unlike his teacher, Serov looks for true beauty, a beauty inaccessible to an eye not endowed with artistic vision; he seeks to fathom human emotions, to divine the human drama involved.  It is these aspirations that brought Serov’s artistry into being, investing him with a penetrating insight into nuances and minor details and an abhorrence for the insipid “verisimilitude” that, in Serov’s opinion, destroys art. 

Serov never depicts character “in general.”  He is interested in a specific facet of that character, the all-important facet that most tellingly reveals the aesthetic worth of the person portrayed.   He uses all the pictorial possibilities of the portrait – pose, gesture, composition, color scheme, the painterly style itself – to bring out the aesthetic merit of the sitter in the most vivid fashion.

From 1890 on, Serov’s portrait work was his most important genre.  His favorite models were actors, artists, and writers, including Konstantin Korovin (1891), Isaac Levitan (1893), Nikolai Leskov (1894) and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1898) -- all in the Tretyakov gallery in Moscow.  After 1900 he painted several outstanding portraits in the grand manner, as well as intimate portraits of women and children.  In addition to oils, he worked in tempera, watercolors, pastels and lithography.

Serov was a creative genius who bridged the gap between the Russian Realists and the Russian modernists with his paintings. What bridges are today’s portrait painters building with their fealty to pixel counts?  Aw, who cares anyway?  We’re heading more and more to a digital world of virtual reality, where a retrograde painter’s vision of the natural world is completely irrelevant.