Kirsi Eskelinen, PhD, Museum Director, Finnish National Gallery, Sinebrychoff Art Museum, Helsinki

 

24 September 2019

 

Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) the great German Renaissance Master, and Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946), one of the most well-known Finnish women painters, are taking centre stage in Helsinki and in London in two important exhibitions.

The Sinebrychoff Art Museum’s exhibition ‘Lucas Cranach – Renaissance Beauties’ presents an area of Cranach’s oeuvre that has received less attention: female beauty and nudes. The starting point for the exhibition concept was the only two Cranach paintings located in Finland, which belong to the Sinebrychoff Art Museum collections: Portrait of a Young Woman (1525) and Lucretia (1530). This is the first monographic exhibition of Cranach to take place in Finland and includes paintings and prints from across Europe’s collections.

We decided to revisit our two Cranach paintings in terms of technical investigation, as well as art-historical research in connection to the forthcoming exhibition. Portrait of a Young Woman was studied comprehensively about 30 years ago, but now there is extensive new technical research data about Cranach’s work that is easily accessible to researchers through Cranach Digital Archive project. At the same time research by art historians has deepened our understanding of Cranach’s art.

Professor Gunnar Heydenreich is head of the Cranach Digital Archive and the leading expert on Cranach’s workshop. We are really delighted and grateful that Dr Heydenreich had time to travel to Helsinki and study the paintings together with our specialists. In this issue we publish an interview with Dr Heydenreich, by Gill Crabbe. The article paints a vivid picture of the art-historical research today and and the refined technical methods used nowadays by conservators in studying works of art.

The major exhibition of Helene Schjerfbeck at London’s Royal Academy of Arts marks an important collaboration with the Ateneum Art Museum. The show will travel to Helsinki later in the autumn. We publish an interview with independent curator Jeremy Lewison who put together the exhibition along with the co-curators Anna-Maria von Bondsdorff, who is Chief Curator at the Ateneum Art Museum, and the RA’s Sarah Lea. Lewison describes the powerful impact Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits had on him, and how they have also been given a significant role in the exhibition. He also emphasises Schjerfbeck’s strong connection with Old Master painting, underlining her engagement with the tradition and her own transformation of it within the modern or the early modernist tradition. Also in this issue, the painter and Royal Academician Ian McKeever reflects on Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits in the context of the development of this genre in Western art. Meanwhile, curator Anu Utriainen offers a more general view on women artists who were active in Finland during the early 20th century in her article dealing with historical, economic and social aspects. This article is also in the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Creating the Self: Emancipating Woman in Estonian and Finnish Art’ that opens at Kumu, Art Museum of Estonia, in Tallinn on 6 December 2019.

Also in this issue the Finnish National Gallery announces its fourth Call for Research Interns, for 2020.

Finally a reminder that this is the last chance to submit proposals for the European Revivals Conference at the Ateneum in January 2020. The deadline is 30 September 2019.

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Featured image: Lucas Cranach the Elder, Portrait of a Young Woman, 1525, oil on panel,
41cm x 27cm. O. W. Klinckowström Collection, Finnish National Gallery / Sinebrychoff Art Museum
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Hannu Aaltonen

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