Gill Crabbe, FNG Research

The Helene Schjerfbeck exhibitions in London and Helsinki are a result of extensive international collaboration between the researchers, curators and the two institutions involved. Chief Curator of the Ateneum Art Museum Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff discusses the research processes, preparations and the themes that emerged for the two shows with Gill Crabbe

—

In 2018, when the Chief Curator of the Ateneum Art Museum Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff travelled to the UK to undertake new research in preparation for the Helene Schjerfbeck exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, she was keen to visit St Ives in Cornwall, as Schjerfbeck had done in the 1880s. Among other things von Bonsdorff hoped to find out whether any of the works known to have been sold in England, but whose whereabouts were currently unknown, might come to light.

‘This is the period in Schjerfbeck’s career that we don’t know so much about,’ she explains, ‘so it was a great opportunity to collaborate with the Royal Academy’s curator, Desiree de Chair, and really get to know more about the artist’s time in St Ives.’ Von Bonsdorff in fact spent two months in the UK alongside her counterparts at the RA, as part of her research for the exhibition, which has now travelled back to Finland to be presented in an expanded version at the Ateneum Art Museum. She was enabled by an innovative and generous professional development scheme in which the Finnish National Gallery provides opportunities for staff to work for an extended period in a museum or cultural institution abroad. ‘London is a very international scene, so for us it was important to be able to show Helene Schjerfbeck there – and like Jeremy Lewison, who curated the show with us, said, the RA is a perfect place to show Schjerfbeck.’

Von Bonsdorff travelled to Cornwall with Desiree de Chair, who was researching for the essay on the St Ives period for the catalogue. ‘I wanted to find out more about the times when Schjerfbeck was travelling and building her career,’ says von Bonsdorff. ‘We were there in March, at the same time of year that Schjerfbeck was there, to see the places where she was living, drawing and painting. St Ives has this extraordinary luminous light, steep streets and very particular air and atmosphere.’ While there, von Bonsdorff was struck by the primroses in bloom, as Schjerfbeck had used the flower as a motif in The Girl from St Ives (Redhead), from 1890. It is the only painting that the artist signed as being from St Ives, although at least 12 of her known paintings come from her time spent there.

—

Featured image: Helene Schjerfbeck, Cypresses, Fiesole, 1894, oil on canvas, 43.5cm x 62.5cm, Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Hannu Aaltonen

…

Read more — Download ‘Beyond Borders’, by Gill Crabbe, as a PDF

Download the interview as a PDF >>

Gill Crabbe, FNG Research

As the Helene Schjerfbeck exhibition opens at the Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki, Gill Crabbe discusses the artist’s self-portraiture with contemporary art curator Patrik Nyberg and art historian Marja Lahelma 

—

Patrik, you are a curator at the Finnish National Gallery’s Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and you have just published your doctoral thesis on Helene Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits. How did you become interested in Schjerfbeck?

Patrik Nyberg I have always been interested in art that seems to critique or subvert its own representation, be it in a video, or any contemporary art, or painting from the modernist era or earlier, so I wanted to look at Helene Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits in this light.

Where would you place Helene Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits in the modernist canon?

PN Well, that’s a question I’m thinking about in my thesis – what is the modernist canon and what kind of painting is defined as modernist painting? I think Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits go beyond the parameters of how modernism is defined by its defenders, such as Clive Bell, Roger Fry and the Greenbergian tradition. These works also question the way that, in the postmodern era, we tend to define painting in the modernist era as self-sustained autonomous art and in favour of an autonomous subject. I think Helene Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits go beyond that idea and are more contemporary in a way.

Marja, you were the opponent for the public defence of Patrik’s doctoral thesis. You have seen the recent Helene Schjerfbeck exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, in which the self-portraits were given a central focus by presenting them chronologically in the room at the heart of the gallery space. What did you make of that kind of presentation – do you think this shows that the self-portraits are the most important of her works?

Marja Lahelma I thought it was quite powerful to walk into that room and as I had already read Patrik’s thesis I was aware of the fact that, although these self-portraits were presented as a chronological sequence, they didn’t really produce a narrative, which I liked. Apart from the early self-portraits, you couldn’t really see a progression that starts from likeness and representation, then going towards abstraction – it doesn’t really work that way with her.

So how did it work?

ML They are all such different kinds of works. In his thesis, Patrik discusses the performative aspect of these works and that became very clear to me in that room. It appeared almost as some kind of a game. I had the impression that Schjerfbeck was really conscious of what she was doing, that there was nothing accidental. I was also aware that these works don’t really say anything about who she was – for example that they reveal the soul – in fact there was nothing of that kind there, it was all about surface. I really liked that.

—

Featured image: Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait with Palette I, 1937, tempera and oil on canvas, 44.5cm x 33.5cm
Moderna Museet, Statens konstmuseer, Stockholm
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Yehia Eweis

…

Read more — Download ‘Helene Schjerfbeck – only an Image?’, by Gill Crabbe, as a PDF

Download the Interview as a PDF >>

 

Mariliis Rebane, MA student, University of Helsinki

This article is published as a result of a three-month research internship at the Finnish National Gallery

—

When the 1952 Olympic Games were organised in Helsinki, the city’s cultural institutions were also preparing themselves for a large number of visitors. The Ateneum Art Museum repainted some of its exhibition galleries, extended its opening hours, hired more staff and ordered new uniforms for the guards. However, the most significant changes were to do with the arrangement of the collection display.^[1] Only a few months earlier, on 21 January 1952, Dr Aune Lindström (1901–84) had been appointed temporary Chief Curator – the position equivalent to the museum director’s post – after her predecessor Torsten Stjernschantz had retired.^[2] The changes that Lindström initiated in the collection display before the Olympic Games were implemented in full during the following years. The updated display was eventually documented seven years later. The period 1952–59 consequently forms the timeframe of this article.

When looking at the 12 black-and-white photographs^[3] by an unknown photographer documenting the Ateneum Art Museum in 1959, I was prompted to revisit the collection display carried out by Lindström. In this article I provide a descriptive overview of the display based on the mentioned images. I also outline the Chief Curator’s initial aspirations in changing the arrangement of the collection. By looking at the images, I aim to reveal whether Lindström’s ambitions were in accord with the eventual collection display. Using the photographic documentation as a source also sets this article apart from the previous studies on the history of the Ateneum Art Museum’s collection display.

—

^[1] Minutes of the Foundation of the Fine Arts Academy of Finland 8 February 1952 § 7, 16 September 1952 § 7. Minutes of the Board and the Representative Council 1952, Minutes of the Board and the Representative Council and School Division Grant Board 1952–1953 (STA / C 11). Archive of the Fine Arts Academy of Finland (AFAAF), Finnish National Gallery (FNG); ‘Ateneumin Taidekokoelmat vuonna 1952’, in Suomen Taideakatemian vuosijulkaisu 1951–1953 (Helsinki: Keskuskirjapaino, 1954), 66; ‘Ateneum valmistautuu olympialaisiin – huomattavia muutoksia kokoelmissa’, Helsingin Sanomat, 21 June 1952; ‘Ateneum olympiakunnossa’, Suomen Sosiaalidemokraatti, 8 July 1952.

^[2] Aune Lindström (1901–84) started work at the Ateneum Art Museum in 1928 when she was hired as a part-time Curator to organise the library, archive, and later also the prints and drawings. Aside from being the Curator, Lindström had taught German and English since 1926 and wrote reviews and art introductions for the Press. Lindström  wrote her dissertation on the von Wright brothers, in 1932. Olli Valkonen, ‘Ateneumin taidemuseon intendentit 1869–1990’, in Tuula Arkio and Marjatta Levanto (eds.), Ateneum (Helsinki: Valtion taidemuseo, 1991), 72; Hanna-Leena Paloposki, ‘Lindström, Aune (1901–1984) Ateneumin taidemuseon intendentti, professori’, Kansallisbiografia, published 11 October 2005 (updated July 25, 2016), https://kansallisbiografia.fi/kansallisbiografia/henkilo/1375 (accessed 5 October 2019).

^[3] The images belong to Finnish National Gallery’s Picture Collections.

—

Featured image: The sculpture room at the Ateneum Art Museum, in 1959. The photograph includes a painting by Ilya Repin and sculptures by Marino Marini, Giacomo Manzù, Ben Renvall, Carl Wilhelms, Felix Nylund, and Wäinö Aaltonen. Photographer unknown.
Negative Collection. Archive Collections, Finnish National Gallery

…

Read more — Download ‘Revisiting the Collection Display at the Ateneum Art Museum in 1959’, by Mariliis Rebane, as a PDF

Download the article as a PDF >>

Ari Tanhuanpää, PhD, Senior Conservator, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki

This is an extended version of the paper presented at the Tahiti 8: National Conference of Art History in Finland, which this year took the theme ‘From Material to Immaterial: Art Historical Practices in the Contemporary World’. University of Turku, 28–29 November 2019

—

Rather than addressing the problem of the dematerialisation of the artwork (which is misplaced because there is only a difference in degree between material and immaterial), I would like to draw attention to a more fundamental problem, namely the ontological difference between matter and materiality. The claim that it is only the ephemeral processes of contemporary art that challenge the established practices in art-historical research gives the impression that questions of materiality in the more traditional art forms could already be adequately answered. It seems that one has had to wait for the (alleged) dematerialisation of the artwork in order to be able to see materiality as a problem – because the more the matter dematerialises, the more the being of materiality (which is neither material nor immaterial, but rather not- or im-material) comes into view. I take the ‘paper’ that Jacques Derrida saw throughout its long history as being made up of its gradual ‘de-paperisation’ as my starting point. In Paper machine (2001)[1], a text written in apocalyptic tone, at the time when the era of paper was in ongoing decline and withdrawal, Derrida discusses paper as a quasi-transcendental apparatus, expanding his perspective to include ‘all the leaves in the world’ (toutes les feuilles du monde), that is, subjectiles of all kinds, things that in one way or another ‘lie below’: hypokeimena.[2] Because, even in our present era of ‘dematerialisation’, we continue to live in the graphosphere, which implies dealing with all kinds of underlying surfaces, actual or virtual.[3]

Two years ago, Päivikki Kallio edited the anthology entitled Art of Transfer and Transmission (2017), which was dedicated to the study, in her words, of ‘printmaking as a conceptual practice, independent of the material means’. The authors of this publication shared a view that printmaking as an activity has the ability to generate ‘new and potentially conceptual thinking’, and that this ability is located in the ‘break or an abyss’ that lies at the core of the act of printing itself. This abyss is the machine, the indeterminate ‘zone’ between the printing plate (or ‘matrix’, as Kallio wants to call it[4] – a sort of maternal subjectile[5]) and the print (or ‘trace’). This ‘apparatus of the printed art’ is a Latourian ‘collective process’, which brings together a number of actants, human, as well as inhuman.[6] Susanne Gottberg, in turn, has for many years created paintings in which the wood grain patterns of the unprimed plywood, used as a painting support, reflects through a painted drapery. Isn’t the strange feeling these paintings creates in us also the result of an abyss – or conflict – between the intentional image object and the physical image carrier? I will come back to this later.

—

[1] Originally, Papier machine (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2001).

[2] Derrida poses a question: ‘When we say “paper” (…) are we naming the empirical body that bears this conventional name? Are we already resorting to a rhetorical figure? Or are we by the same token designating this “quasi-transcendental paper” (…).’ Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine. Trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005 [2001]), 52; Jacques Derrida, ‘Maddening the Subjectile’. Trans. Mary Ann Caws. Yale French Studies, 84, 1994, (154–171), 157–58, 169. The subjectile, the untranslatable French notion presumably first used by Antonin Artaud, does not refer to any determinate substance, or object of knowing. In fact, as Derrida reminds us, even Artaud did ‘not speak about the subjectile as such, only of what “is called” by this name’. The subjectile is ‘the unique body of the work in its first event, at its moment of birth, which cannot be repeated’. Furthermore, the subjectile is not reliable, it can betray, ‘not come when it is called, or call before even being called, before even receiving its name’. The subjectile is always ‘to come’ (à-venir), and ‘oscillates between the intransitivity of jacere and the transitivity of jacere’. Anyway, we can list some features of subjectiles, they are ‘everything distinct from form, as well as from the sense and representation, which is not representable’. There are various materials which can be called by this notion (i.e. they are not subjectiles as such, but one can refer to them by using this name: wall and wood surfaces, paper and textiles. Derrida writes that among subjectiles there are two classes: the ones that ‘let them be traversed (we call them porous, like plasters, mortar, wood, cardboard, textiles, paper) and the others (metals or their alloys) which permit no passage’.

[3] Derrida claims that even today, ‘the page continues, in many ways (…) to govern a large number of surfaces of inscription, even where the body of paper is no longer there in person (…). Even when we write on the computer, it is still with a view to the final printing paper, whether or not this takes place.’ Derrida 2005 [2001], 46.

[4] Kallio specifies, that ‘(a) matrix can be considered the conceptual turning point, a moment when the transmission or translation takes place’. Päivikki Kallio, ‘New Strategies – Printmaking as a Spatial Process, as a Transmissional Process, and as a Spatial-Transmissional Process’. In Jan Pettersson (ed.), Printmaking in the Expanded Field (Oslo: Oslo National Academy of the Arts, 2017), (87–105), 88.

[5] Because, as Derrida reminds us, the subjectile ‘can take the place of the subject or of the object – being neither one nor the other’. Derrida 1994, (154–171), 154.

[6] Inhuman actants are, for instance ‘presses, corrosives, plates, printing inks, tarlatans, stones, [and] rolls’. Kallio 2017, (87–105), 87; Päivikki Kallio, ‘Välissä ja vyöhykkeellä’. In Päivikki Kallio (ed.), Siirtämisen ja välittymisen taide (Helsinki: Kuvataideakatemia, 2017), (17–63), 18, 28, 43; Milla Toukkari, ‘Kuilun filosofia’. In Päivikki Kallio (ed.), Siirtämisen ja välittymisen taide (Helsinki: Kuvataideakatemia, 2017), (103–157), 107. Kallio believes that ‘by using the concept of the matrix it is possible to study works that do not use any paper to make the trace visible’. However, even if there is no paper in the printmaking of the expanded field, there is still always some kind of subjectile, no matter what name one gives it.

—

Featured image: Susanne Gottberg: Object, 2013–14, oil and colour pencil on wood, 122cm x 86cm. Finnish National Gallery / Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Petri Virtanen

…

Read more — Download ‘”All the Leaves in the World”: the Subjectile as a Problem’, by Ari Tanhuanpää, as a PDF

Download the article as a PDF >>