Text by Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff, Rebecca Bray, Désirée de Chair, Jeremy Lewison.
Though little known outside her native country, Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946) is one of Finland’s best-loved artists, and has influenced artists far beyond its borders. Her career, which stretched from the late 1870s to the end of World War II, spanned both impressionism and modernism.
Helene Schjerfbeck is published to accompany a major survey exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of the Arts, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK since she exhibited in London in 1890. The full range of her exceptional work is presented, with 70 paintings in all genres, including portraits and self-portraits, landscapes and still lifes. With essays about Schjerfbeck’s technique, her social and cultural context and her influence on later artists such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, this volume offers a thorough introduction to the artist’s work and legacy.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Helene Schjerfbeck.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Evening Standard
Melanie McDonagh
Her paintings of her mother, which irresistibly recall Whistler are wonderful: affectionate without being sentimental and with a daughter’s eye to detail…. This is an overdue tribute to a very considerable artist.
Time Out
Rosemary Waugh
[T]here’s a ‘modern’ aspect to many of Schjerfbeck’s images. Right from the off, the women in her portraits look alive, real and healthy…. This is what makes Schjerfbeck fascinating. Instead of tapering off into rehearsed formulas, her art gets better as it heads from start to finish.
New York Times
Rachel Campbell-Johnston
an utterly riveting view of the Finnish Munch… you are in for the most wonderfully striking surpise.
Guardian
Laura Cumming
[Helene Schjerfbeck] reworked her paintings with brushes, palette knives and even sandpaper to get her distinctive look, which involves amazingly subtle shifts of tone and a superb line that pins things down, hemming in floating colours and shapes, fine as dressmaker’s chalk.
Midwest Book Review
James Cox
Impressively informative, beautifully illustrated, exceptionally organized and presented, "Helene Schjerfbeck" showcases the life and career of an extraordinary artist...
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“Self-portrait, Light and Shadow” (1945) is reproduced from the Royal Academy of Arts’ enlightening new catalog for the Helene Schjerfbeck exhibition on view through late October. Called “Finland’s Munch” by one review in The Guardian, and a “painter of great subtlety and a master of the self-portrait,” in another, Schjerfbeck has been virtually unknown outside of her home country until now. Over her lifetime, the artist painted and drew about 40 self-portraits, which “chartered her moods, her ageing process and her physical decline to the point where the paintings become ironic and display gallows humor,” Jeremy Lewison writes. “In the late self-portraits, painted towards the end of the Second World War, when news of the death camps was leaking out, Schjerfbeck seemed to elide her own predicament with an expression of existential angst. Her face becomes a ruin, evincing a memory of what once was, a coming to being of an image that never attains a concrete form.” continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9 x 10.75 in. / 168 pgs / 120 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $40.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $55 ISBN: 9781912520039 PUBLISHER: Royal Academy of Arts AVAILABLE: 9/17/2019 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Published by Royal Academy of Arts. Text by Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff, Rebecca Bray, Désirée de Chair, Jeremy Lewison.
Though little known outside her native country, Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946) is one of Finland’s best-loved artists, and has influenced artists far beyond its borders. Her career, which stretched from the late 1870s to the end of World War II, spanned both impressionism and modernism.
Helene Schjerfbeck is published to accompany a major survey exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of the Arts, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK since she exhibited in London in 1890. The full range of her exceptional work is presented, with 70 paintings in all genres, including portraits and self-portraits, landscapes and still lifes. With essays about Schjerfbeck’s technique, her social and cultural context and her influence on later artists such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, this volume offers a thorough introduction to the artist’s work and legacy.
