CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/29/2019

Finland's best-kept secret no more, Helene Schjerfbeck is a revelation

“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.”