Interpretations of illness, loneliness, pain and suffering in the art of Helene Schjerfbeck.

-Clare Elizabeth Hyatt-

Interpretations of illness, loneliness, pain and suffering in the art of Helene Schjerfbeck.

Interpretations of illness, loneliness, pain and suffering in the art of Helene Schjerfbeck.

This 2011 dissertation fulfils the requirements for both SA4098 Library based Dissertation in Social Anthropology and AH4099 30 Credit Dissertation in Art History for the School of Art History at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank my advisors Jeremy Howard and Mattia Fumanti, for their openminded approach and encouragement during the writing of this dissertation. I would also like to thank Art Historian and chief curator of The Finnish National Gallery (Ateneum), Leena Ahtola-Moorhouse for her time, tasty hints and enthusiasm; the chief curator of Villa Gyllenberg, Nina Zillincus, for her inspirational tour; the Ostrobothnian Museum curator, Libeth Knif, for her guidance; the staff at The Finnish Embassy (London) for their generosity and The Wellcome collection Library for the use of their books and beautiful study space.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

i.

Synopsis

1

Introduction -Helene Schjerfbeck – fragments, context, questions and theories.

-Personal reflections.

2 2 4

Chapter I - Constructions of Illness Identity -A reclusive maiden, haunted by illness: archetypal personhood.

-Scratched, blurred and partial selves: the liminal ‘cosmos’ of chronic illness.

-The weakness of woman: illness as a catalyst for gendered identity.

5 5 7 9

Chapter II - An Intersubjective Presentation of Pain -The effeminate wounded soldier: questions of intersubjective gender.

-Blackened fruit: mirroring decay and objectifying pain.

-The Convalescent and temporal space.

12 12 14 15

Chapter III - A Narrative Envelopment of Imaged Suffering -The transformation of the sick cow and other tales of recuperative self.

-Schjerfbeck mythology? Deconstructing art historical narrative.

-Beyond The Magic Mountain. A story saturated in illness.

18 19 21 22

Conclusion -Observations, thoughts and questions left unanswered...

24 24

Bibliography

25

Appendix

30

Illustrations

32

ILLUSTRATIONS

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Title page illustration, Helene Schjerfbeck, 1890s, photograph, The Finnish National Gallery (Ateneum), Helsinki.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait, 1878, pencil on paper, Museet Ett Hem, Åbo, 33.5x26.5cm.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait, c.

1880, pencil on paper, private collection, 13.4x12.2.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait, 1884-1885, oil on canvas, Ateneum, Helsinki, 50x40.5.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait, 1895, oil on canvas, Tammisaari Museum, 38x31.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait, 1912, oil on canvas, private collection, 43x42.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait with Silver Background, study 1915, pencil, watercolour, charcoal and silver leaf on paper, Turku Art Museum, 47x34.5.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait with Black Background, 1915, oil on canvas, Ateneum Helsinki, 45.5x36.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Unfinished SelfPortrait (reverse of Factory Girls on the Way to Work), 1921-22, oil on canvas, Riihimäki Art Museum, 44.4x50.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait, 1913-1926, charcoal, watercolour and oil on canvas, Pori Art Museum, 32x24.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait in Profile, c.1933, charcoal, chalk and gouache on paper, private collection, Stockholm, 24x30.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait with Dark Dress, 1934, oil on canvas mounted on wood, private collection, 37x26.5.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait, 1935, oil on canvas mounted on wood, Gösta Stenman collection, Stockholm, 27x24.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait with Palette, 1937, charcoal and watercolour on paper, 53x40.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait with Palette I, 1937, tempera and oil on canvas, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 54.5x41.

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Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait with Black Mouth, sketch 1939, charcoal on paper, private collection, 41x26.5.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait with Black Mouth, 1939, oil on canvas, Didrichsen Art Museum, Helsinki, 40x28.2.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait, 1942, oil on board, private collection, Sweden, 30x25.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait, 1944, oil on canvas, Gösta Stenman collection, Stockholm, 42x36.5.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait with Red Spot, 1944, oil on canvas, Ateneum, Helsinki, 45x37.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait with Palette II, 1937-45, oil on canvas, Gösta Stenman collection, Stockholm, 44.5x33.5.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait en face I, 1945, oil on canvas, private collection, Helsinki, 39.5x31.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait.

Saltsjöbaden, 1944 or 1945, charcoal and wash on paper, Didrichen Art Museum, Helsinki, 32x24.5.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait.

Light and Shadow, 1945, oil on canvas, private collection, Stockholm, 36x34.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait. Bust, 1945, charcoal, wash and watercolour on paper, Gösta Stenman collection, Stockholm, 41x35.5.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait, En gammal målarinna (An Old Painter), 1945, oil on canvas, private collection, Sweden, 32x26.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait with Closed Eyes, 1945, charcoal and wash on paper, private collection, Sweden, 39.5x31.5.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait, 1945, pencil and wash on paper, private collection, Sweden, 18x14.7.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait in Black and Pink, 1945, oil on canvas, private collection, Espoo, 35x23.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait.

Mask, 1945, pencil on paper, Ateneum, Helsinki, 16x14.5.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Last Self-Portrait, 1945, charcoal on paper, Gyllenberg collection, Helsinki, 18.5x17.5.

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Marianne von Werefkin, Self-Portrait in a Sailor’s Blouse, 1893, oil on canvas, Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna, Ascona, Switzerland, 69x51.

Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait with Spanish Flu, 1919, oil on canvas, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo, 150.5x131.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Girl in Rocking Chair, 1910, oil on canvas, Turku Art Museum, 63x59.5.

Photograph taken by Einar Reuter, Helene Schjerfbeck painting in Tammisaari, summer 1918.

Viktor Borisov-Musatov, Portrait of the artist with his sister, 1898, oil and tempura on canvas, The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, 143x177.

Yayoi Kusama, Self-Obliteration by Dots (detail), 1968, performance, photographed by Hal Rei. Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column, 1944, oil on canvas, Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño, Mexico City, 40x30.5.

Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait, c.1920, photograph, Jersey Heritage Trust, 21x12.4.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Wounded Soldier in the Snow, 1880, oil on canvas, Ateneum, Helsinki, 28.5x59.5.

Del la Grace Volcano, Jax Revealed, London, 1991, fiberbased chlorobromide print, 50.5x61.

Vasily Vereshchagin, Left Behind, 1871.

Photograph taken by Harald Holström, Helene Schjerfbeck in her apartment in Tammisaari, working on the still life Pumpkins, 1937.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Pumpkins, 1937, oil on canvas, Pori Art Museum, Finland, 49x60.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Still Life with Blackening Apples, 1944, oil on canvas, Didrichsen Museum, Helsinki, 36x50.

Helene Schjerfbeck, The Convalescent, 1888, oil on canvas, Ateneum, Helsinki, 92x107.

Helene Schjerfbeck, The Convalescent, early 1890s, watercolour on paper, private collection, Helsinki, 21x19.

Helene Schjerfbeck, The Convalescent, 1927, oil on canvas, Åhlén collection, Stockholm, 56x75.

Helene Schjerfbeck, The Convalescent, 1945, drawing and watercolour on paper, 41.5x51.

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John Bellany, Janus, 1982, screenprint on paper, Tate Collection, London, 91.5x68.5.

Helene Schjerfbeck, By the Window, 1883, oil on canvas, private collection, Sweden, 21.5x31.5.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Churchgoers (Easter Morning), 1895-1900, oil on canvas, Ateneum, Helsinki, 70x95.

Helene Schjerfbeck (and others?), När Kon Blef Sjuk (Också en Sommarsaga), c.1899.

Hans Baldung Grien, The Three Ages of Man and Death, c.1541-4, oil on panel, Museo del Prado, Madrid, 151x61.

Helene Schjerfbeck, The Sickbed, 187778, oil on canvas mounted on board, Museum of Ostrobothnia, Vaasa, Finland, 23x27.

Johanne Kreb, A Young Girl (Anna Koefoed), 1896, oil on card, Århus kunstmuseum, Denmark, 27x35.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Sorrow (Child of Heat, The Gipsy Woman), 1919, oil on canvas, private collection, Finland, 81x100.

Vincent Van Gogh, Sorrow, 1882, drawing, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 33x44.

Helene Schjerfbeck, The Broken String (By the Rivers of Babylon...), 1890s, oil on canvas, private collection, Finland, 70x61.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Nurse I (Kaija Lahtinen), 1943, oil on canvas, private collection, Helsinki, 46x32.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Finnish Nurse III (Ester Räihä), 1943, oil on canvas, private collection, Helsinki, 54.5x47.

Helene Schjerfbeck, The Death of Wilhelm von Schwerin, 1886, oil on canvas, Turku Art Museum, Finland, 90x117.5.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Funeral in Brittany (Cortège), 1884, oil on canvas, Museum of Ostrobothnia, Vaasa, Finland, 175x102.

Helene Schjerfbeck, Nature Morte, c.1877, oil on canvas mounted on wood, Museum of Ostrobothnia, Vaasa, Finland, 36x46.

ii.

SYNOPSIS In this text, I explore the complex ways in which illness, loneliness, pain and suffering may have affected the works of Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946) and the consequent interpretations of her oeuvre and life. Moreover, this project is an exercise in drawing the disciplines of art history and social anthropology together in order to interrogate specific human visualisations, interpretations and categorisations of ill-health. In this way, the concepts of identity, intersubjectivity and narrative are called upon to navigate both written and visual negotiations of Schjerfbeck’s chronically ill body which have transformed her personhood from ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’ to ‘other’.

1

INTRODUCTION “A hip ailment from early childhood cast a shadow over Schjerfbeck’s life, which has fostered the myth of a frail, yet sophisticated recluse who turned her back on prevailing Finnish and international art trends to find a path of her own,” (Sarajas-Korte 1992:19).

“The creation of such a myth has been fruitful in the sense that to this day it encourages young Finnish artists to refer to Helene Schjerfbeck in their work and thus provide a new interpretation of her art. It proves to be a hindrance, however, when it presents Schjerfbeck as a victim rather than as a supremely professional artist devoted to the medium of painting; this negative view exerts too strong an influence on the way her oeuvre is perceived,” (Görgen 2007:41).

FRAGMENTS

She was four years old when it happened. Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946) fell down the stairs, damaging her left hip. In this text, I investigate Sarajas-Korte’s claim that this singular incident has shaped art historical analysis of Schjerfbeck’s oeuvre and identity, placing her within a paradigm of illness, loneliness, pain and suffering. I also explore Görgen’s analysis of this ‘myth’ as both fruitful and fruitless. Never healing properly, her injury left her with a permanent limp and lifelong physical and psychological pain. As her body aged, her health grew inevitably worse and she became increasingly focused on painting emotive self-portraits to which she now owes her fame. I suggest that Schjerfbeck’s experience of chronic illness as a continual ‘process’ instigated her utilisation of ‘the visual’ to make sense of, and control, both her individual world and individual body. Thus, through artistic practice, she externalised her suffering into aesthetic ‘art objects’ of interest to the art historian and anthropologist alike. Yet, interpreting Schjerfbeck’s physical and psychological experience of pain is unavoidably fragmentary. Now banished to the realms of history, Schjerfbeck’s pain remains merely in the social forms of paintings, letters, art historical and contemporary writings. Despite her fervent popularity in Finland, Schjerfbeck remains relatively undiscovered outside Scandinavia; in part, this is due to the wealth of untranslated documents. Therefore, this text aims to reignite interest in Schjerfbeck’s life and art for viewers beyond Scandinavia and confirm her importance within the canon.

Moreover, using social and medical anthropology as a lens through which to interrogate selected fragments of Schjerfbeck’s pain, this text aims to prove Clifford (1985:243) right in his assertion that “the boundaries of art and science, the aesthetic and the anthropological, are not permanently fixed.”

CONTEXT: FAMILY, FIANCÉ, FRIENDS, FINLAND

The biographical contexts detailed here emphasise the legitimacy of Schjerfbeck’s illness, loneliness, pain and suffering. Firstly, the misfortunes endured by Schjerfbeck's family have provided further justification for interpreting her paintings as melancholic. Prior to her birth, her parents suffered the loss of their first daughter, Olga Sofia. Subsequently, two of her younger siblings died at only one year of age. Her father, Svante, was declared bankrupt in Pietarsaari, which forced the family to move to Helsinki, where he worked as a manager for the Finnish state railway until his premature death from tuberculosis in 1876.

Consequently, thirteen year old Helene’s family were left in financial devastation.

Nevertheless, she was able to relish her freedom as a talented young artist, finding herself in major artistic hubs: Paris, St. Petersburg, St. Ives, Vienna and Florence. It was during a visit to the Pont-Aven artist colony (Brittany) in 1885 that Schjerfbeck fell in love and became engaged to an unknown English artist. Yet this was also to prove tragic. Her fiancé broke off their engagement due to the history of tuberculosis in her family. This event plunged Schjerfbeck into a depressive state. Plagued by ill-health throughout the 1890s, Schjerfbeck travelled infrequently thereafter and taught drawing at the Finnish Art Society in Helsinki from 1894. Once her brother Magnus married and left home in 1897 it became Schjerfbeck’s sole responsibility to care for her elderly mother, Olga. Soon after, Schjerfbeck was forced to officially resign from her teaching post for health reasons and moved to Hyvinkää (famed for 2

its dry air) with her mother in 1902. Thereby isolated from the Helsinki art scene, writing letters became her primary form of communication with the outside world. With more than 2000 of Schjerfbeck’s letters to relatives, other artists and friends still in existence it is clear that social relationships were important to her, and, I would suggest, beneficial to her psychological health. Friendships of particular note are those with the artists Helena Westermarck and Maria Wiik, her teacher Adolph von Becker, her art dealer Gösta Stenman and close friend Einer Reuter, who, under the alias H. Ahtela, later became her biographer. Importantly, Görgen (2007:41) suggests that by accentuating her personal misfortunes Reuter’s subjective view “contributed greatly to Schjerfbeck’s near-mythical status,” and therefore his subsequent influence on art historical writings should not be underestimated.

Finland’s art scene began to flourish in the early 19th century following the end of Swedish reign in 1809 and under the initially liberal rule of the Russian Empire. From the outset it featured “an unusually large number of women artists,” (Görgen 2007:41).

However, after gaining independence in 1917, Finland experienced a “male dominated, stagnating art scene,” (Görgen 2007:42). Therefore, Schjerfbeck painted and gained success in a relatively utopian pocket of gender egalitarianism. But while her gender proved atypically unproblematic for her success as a professional artist, it nevertheless contributed to the myth of a frail yet sophisticated recluse. Other factors of Schjerfbeck’s circumstances have proved similarly contributory. Sarajas-Korte (1992:19-20) places Schjerfbeck within a linguistic, politico-cultural context as part of “the impoverished Swedish intelligentsia of southern Finland.” Here, then, a picture of Schjerfbeck as an outsider, bodily, linguistically, nationally and financially is developed. She is set apart.

QUESTIONS

How have art historians placed Schjerfbeck within a paradigm of illness? In what ways can this ‘myth’ affect interpretations of her art? Would Schjerfbeck have been as successful or more so if this illness ‘myth’ did not surround her? In what ways can her gender affect interpretations of her suffering? Why does Schjerfbeck remain on the peripheries of the Eurocentric art historical canon? Is her illness to blame for this sidelining?

THEORY: IDENTITY, INTERSUBJECTIVITY, NARRATIVE

In order to explore the possible answers surrounding these questions, I employ three theoretical concepts from within medical anthropology: identity, intersubjectivity and narrative. These concepts then form the structure of this text, though, inevitably, some themes and ideas occasionally overlap. Further to this, the art, art theory, ethnographic encounters and anthropological theory of others are also introduced in order to place the specificities of Schjerfbeck’s case within a wider interpretive web. The first chapter, ‘Constructions of Illness Identity’, investigates illness as a collective transformatory process in which the sufferer’s very identity is questioned, and, in the case of chronic illness, trapped in a permanent state of liminality. Thus, chapter I focuses on the visual identity provided by Schjerfbeck’s extensive self-portraits in conjunction with written constructions of her identity as a reclusive maiden, haunted by illness. In this way, Schjerfbeck’s ‘archetypal personhood’ is considered. Her scratched, blurred and partial self-portraits are then interpreted in relation to their implication of her liminality as an ill ‘other’ before an exploration of her (written and visualised) gendered identity reveals further depths to her illness identity’s complexity.

The second chapter, ‘An Intersubjective Presentation of Pain’, utilises the concept of intersubjectivity in order to uncover interpretations of Schjerfbeck’s therapeutic relationship with persons, objects and times beyond her own corporeal subjective reality. Thus, this chapter considers Schjerfbeck’s ‘hidden self-portraits’; paintings which have been interpreted 3

by art historians as autobiographical but which were not consciously recognised by Schjerfbeck as such. The subjectivities of art historians’ interpretations will consequently echo the recent, widely discussed, psychoanalytical use of intersubjectivity in art therapy. In this way, The Wounded Soldier (1880) conjures up questions of Schjerfbeck’s use of intersubjective gender to portray loneliness, paintings of rotting fruit are explored as vehicles towards an objectification of Schjerfbeck’s pained, crumbling body and The Convalescent (1888), extends this therapeutic examination into the realms of temporality.

The third and final chapter, ‘A Narrative Envelopment of Imaged Suffering’, moves on to investigate readings of Schjerfbeck’s visual narrative beyond her conscious and subconscious self-portraits in order to reveal the power of combining biographical narrative with interpretations of imaged suffering. Narratives have enjoyed considerable attention in medical anthropology recently, thanks, in part, to Mattingly’s (1994&1998) discussions on ‘therapeutic emplotment’ in which the sufferer, together with others, “gives meaning to both the suffering and the therapeutic actions by putting them within a larger story or framework,” (Janzen 2002:168). Moreover these therapeutic narratives have the power to continually offer new versions of personal and societal realities, and thus, are of endless interest to the anthropologist. The illness-laden narratives surrounding Schjerfbeck are therefore questioned, deconstructed and analysed in order to assess the extent to which Schjerfbeck’s ill-health can be deemed ‘mythology’. Finally, Schjerfbeck’s reflexive relationship with the narratives in Mann’s illness-laden novel The Magic Mountain is examined in order to consider the reflexivity of narrated therapeutic frameworks.

PERSONAL REFLECTIONS (The Reflexivity of Therapeutic Frameworks)

As the anthropological gaze has expanded, Mattingly & Garro (2000:20) note that “ethnographies built around personal stories emphasise the ‘de-centred’ character of anthropological research and introduce the anthropologist's voice.” In this way, just as Schjerfbeck located her Self within The Magic Mountain, I locate my ‘Self’, my experiences of pain and art, within Schjerfbeck’s paintings and their interpretations. I find Schjerfbeck to be a particularly interesting case in that her pain is not obvious: the visualisations of her body only hint at her suffering and thus expose the ambiguities surrounding chronic conditions which situate the sufferer between ‘normal’ and ‘disabled’. Indeed, having personally found the use of artist practice to alleviate the ambiguous emotional and social constraints of chronic arthritis, my exploration of interpretive strategies throughout this text also represents my desire to encounter and understand personal illness meanings. As Kleinman (1988:87) inspirationally contends “illness, together with other forms of misery, sometimes brings a kind of passion and knowledge of the human condition...” As a further reflexion, while writing this text, I met a fellow young arthritis sufferer from Dundee who explored the meeting place of pain, art and philosophy in her dissertation just last year, concluding: “pain’s invisibility, yet visibility, and inexpressibility, yet expressibility, is part of the ongoing battle,” (Smith 1010). This in itself suggests the widespread relevance of interpreting the images and writings of others in order to make sense of one’s own ambiguous corporeal weaknesses.

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CHAPTER I CONSTRUCTIONS OF ILLNESS IDENTITY “...the individual experience of being sick is marked by a range of feelings, dawning subjective realisations, and self-images that are of interest to the medical anthropologist,” (Janzen 2002:152).

It is debated whether or not Schjerfbeck’s paintings expose her ill-health, and yet, art historical writings remain saturated with notions of a suffering artist. Approaching her selfportraits with her biography in mind, she is instantly categorised within an archetypal frame of reference. As prominent medical anthropologist Kleinman (in Ewing 1998:199) observes: “An effective strategy in medical anthropology is to demonstrate how a patient's illness complaints and convictions reproduce a particular moral domain. Via visible social archetypes and invisible social processes, pain and lay modes of help seeking are shown to replicate a cultural world, one, moreover, that the anthropologist can validly interpret.”

In this way, Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits have habitually been interpreted as forms of ‘help seeking’ which thereby reveal the domains of her illness ‘world’. Importantly, interpretations of visualised illness and ‘help seeking’ are primarily subjective social constructions. Indeed, Schjerfbeck’s illness identity can be seen to arise from what Lévi-Strauss labelled ‘bricolage’, in his studies of totemism and primitive classification. That is to say, the tendency of human thought to strive for coherent symbolic wholes. In this chapter, fragmented contemporary observations, letters, and paintings are examined in order to demonstrate how Schjerfbeck’s chronically ill body has been (and can be) exploited by human categorisation. In light of this, a selection of her self-portraits and approaches to her gender are boldly interpreted in relation to her constructed liminality as an ‘ill’ and ‘weak’ other.

A RECLUSIVE MAIDEN HAUNTED BY ILLNESS: ARCHETYPAL PERSONHOOD 1

Crucial to the formation of Schjerfbeck’s archetypal personhood are the observations made by her contemporaries, those who initiated the classification. As a starting point, prejudice towards the physically incapable is evident in Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924). For example, the flamboyant Italian character Settembrini articulates: “a human being who is first of all an invalid is all body; therein lies his inhumanity and his debasement.

In most cases he is little better than a carcass...,” (Mann [1999]:98). Having been familiar with the novel, I surmise that Schjerfbeck was aware of her ‘potential’ archetypal identity.

Indeed, Sinisalo (1992: 9-11) argues that at the time “anyone with a noticeable physical handicap was branded little short of a good-for-nothing.” This statement is useful in revealing both the discriminatory social world Schjerfbeck faced and the current perception that recent generations have largely overcome such prejudices. A reality I suggest we are far from achieving. 2 Sinisalo then goes on to refer to a letter written in 1887 by American artist Howard Russell Butler who was painting in St Ives at the same time as Schjerfbeck: “...lately there has arrived a young lady from Finland - she has a wonderful talent and is a most interesting person altogether, although unfortunately lame...” 3 Here, Sinisalo’s inclusion of Butler’s letter and his disappointment at her physical weakness re-establishes the embedded art historical notion of Schjerfbeck as ‘other’. Meanwhile, Butler’s disappointment can perhaps be explained by Murphy’s (1995:100) observation that “the disabled serve as constant, visible reminders to the able-bodied that the society they live in is shot through 1 In the interest of clarity, Personhood in this instance refers to society’s understandings and laws regarding how an individual should be represented and treated. Archetype refers to the Jungian figures that exist collectively within a universal human subconscious, across academic disciplines. Carl Jung’s argument that people who experience mental illnesses are subsequently haunted by them is also included here.

2 In 1980, French rehabilitation physician and anthropologist, Claude Hamonet created the culture of ‘handicap’ so as to avoid the negative labels that arose from transferring a taxonomy of nature, and disease, onto disabilities (Janzen 2002:203). Inevitably, however, stigmas have subsequently been associated with the word ‘handicap’ as the people it denotes do not fit within the boundaries of health and normality.

3 As quoted in Jacob, M. 1985, 159.

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with inequity and suffering.” Moreover, ill bodies present a fearsome possibility; they expose the reality that every Body is vulnerable to similar illness and thus they distort sociability.

Furthermore, another observation of Schjerfbeck’s sickly nature is found in the critic Edvard Richter, who wrote in Helsigin Sanomat 4 on the November 1914: “Miss Schjerfbeck has, despite her physical weaknesses or perhaps because of them, continued to deepen her skills and understanding, and her latest works are among her best.” 5 In this extract, Richter similarly uses her ill-health to define her personhood but goes further, engaging with the idea that physical weakness can prove motivational. Indeed, would critics such as Richter have seen her achievements in such a favourable light had she not triumphed in the face of adversity? Here we can again look to Murphy (1995:103) who suggests the disabled person must make an extra effort to establish their status as “an autonomous, worthy individual.”

Certainly then, it can be suggested that Schjerfbeck perceived art as a means towards autonomy. Whether this was a conscious perception is another matter.

In her letters, Schjerfbeck reveals that at the very least, she was aware of the connection between suffering and successful artistic endeavour. Discussing Rembrandt, in a letter to Einar Reuter on February 1945 she wrote: “he would have been an ordinary painter, but sorrow came to him and he became Rembrandt.” 6 Indicative that the pain he experienced was imperative to his painterly aptitude, she perhaps empathised with the old master and this in turn has influenced the analysis of her own oeuvre. Indeed, Schjerfbeck’s use of biographical knowledge to interpret Rembrandt’s paintings provides an uncanny parallel with the way her own paintings have been approached. Further evidence that Schjerfbeck was aware of her illness identity is found in Görgen’s (2007:41) assertion that “statements made by the artist herself also helped to create the myth that now surrounds her.” Görgen then refers to a French critic’s ravings of Schjerfbeck’s talents in La Revue Moderne des arts et de la vie, 7 following her participation in an exhibition in Gothenburg in 1923. The article included a letter in which, “addressing her French readers, the artist emphasises her weak constitution, which means that she can only work for two hours a day...,” (Görgen 2007:44). Here, Schjerfbeck actively cultivates her identity as reclusive and ill.

Looking at paintings, we return to the debate over whether Schjerfbeck’s work reveals her ill-health. Schjerfbeck expert Ahtola-Moorhouse (1992:78) recognises a violent frankness with which the artist reveals “oversensitivity, pride, a sense of duty, severity, shyness, courage, a longing for tenderness and a tendency to depression,” therefore, revealing aspects of her pain experience. Yet, in an extension of the comparison with Rembrandt, Schneede (2007:34) argues:

“she gave no clues as to her lifelong handicap and the hardship and pain she suffered as a result. In this respect she differed from artists such as Rembrandt, Edvard Munch, Max Beckmann or Frida Kahlo. The head, the face, were placed at the centre of the image as objectifiable entities, while her actual personal suffering remained in the background.”

While it may well be true that her head becomes an objectifiable entity, I would argue that certainly during her later paintings, Schjerfbeck’s intimate facial depictions betray the psychological fragilities of her ongoing pain. To take some examples, in Fig.11: Self-Portrait with Dark Dress (1934), and Fig.16:Self-Portrait with Black Mouth (1939), she appears emaciated and fragile. In contrast to her sickly-pale skin, black paint is thickly applied to her enlarged eyes and mouth revealing a diseased, rotting within. No longer contained, her pain A Finnish Daily Broadsheet newspaper still in circulation today. Its name derives from the Finnish capital Helsinki but was originally established in 1889 under the name Päivälehti before it was changed to Helsingin Sanomat in 1905.

5 As quoted in Ahtola-Moorhouse, L. 2007, 27.

6 As quoted in Ahtola-Moorhouse, L. 1992, 76-8.

7 La Revue Moderne des arts et de la vie (The Review of Modern art and life) was a critical Parisian arts magazine published between 1920 and1982. No. 21-22, 1923, 10, cited by Görgen.

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erupts onto the canvas through these blackened orifices, by no means remaining in the background. If my interpretation of these paintings is accurate, Schjerfbeck embraces her status as ‘other’, cautiously exposing her suffering. In this way, I believe her self-portraits have furthered her strong archetypal identity amongst art historians and, despite Schneede’s argument, align her paintings with those of Rembrandt and Kahlo. Nevertheless, as in modern medicine, “what is observed and noted depends also on what the observer believes to be significant, and this depends on the observer's ideas about health and disease,” (Polunin 1777:87-8). Thus, with the insight of biography, it is left for the individual to interpret visualised pain.

SCRATCHED, BLURRED AND PARTIAL SELVES: THE LIMINAL ‘COSMOS’ OF CHRONIC ILLNESS

Schjerfbeck’s somatic ill-health meant persistent but not life-threatening pain. As Janzen (2002:135) notes, “illness is often symbolised as a rite of passage out of which one might hope to pass back into society.” Thus, in the same way that Finland is peripheral, caught between east and west, the chronically ill often find themselves in a continual state of suspended liminality. 8 Schjerfbeck’s experience of liminality 9 was, then, of a space neither ill nor well, neither socially active nor socially removed. Art historian Howard (2006:124) labels Schjerfbeck, along with Russian artist Borisov-Musatov as a disabled ‘outsider’ thereby exiling her from the realms of the healthy. In parallel, Schjerfbeck illustrates frustration with her ill-health but an ultimate embrace of its label in her letter to Einer Reuter on the February 1927: “...if you have this desire to paint - why is it taken away from you by permanent illness! In 50 years not one single day of good health. You get so tired from the constant struggle - you want to sit down and just be a little, tired creature who knits socks...” 10

In this way, Howard and Schjerfbeck reject her liminality, substituting it for the universally recognised category of ‘ill’. Thus, her self-portraits have been interpreted as attempts to override her pain; whether she is interpreted as ‘ill’ or ‘healthy’ in these images is therefore irrelevant. However, I argue that this very debate has materialised in reaction to the ambivalence surrounding her illness and that, in fact, her portraits reveal a space ‘in between’, a space even more stigmatising than illness itself. I suggest that above all, it is the scratched, blurred and partial self-portraits that reveal Schjerfbeck’s liminality as an ill ‘other’.

On the reverse of Factory Girls on the Way to Work hides Fig.8: Unfinished Self-Portrait (1921/22) engulfed in gloom and watery grey. Shadows and overpainting obscure her corporeality, confusing the real and ethereal. Schjerfbeck tentatively approaches the edge of the darkness, her chin and right cheek enjoying a dull luminosity. But while most of her paintings have layer upon layer of paint scraped away in a passionate search for depth of colour and feeling, this painting displays significantly deeper scratches scored violently through her face. She said of this portrait: “my portrait... will have a dead expression, thus the painter reveals the soul, and I can’t help it I’m searching for an expression, something gloomier, stronger.”11 In this way, Schjerfbeck reveals emotion, passion, perhaps even anger towards her image in the curving scratches, which could conceivably have been gouged out with her fingernails? A comparison of this is found in Marianne von Werefkin’s Fig.31: SelfPortrait in a Sailor’s Blouse (1893) in which thickly applied vertical lines of paint on the face echo the violent red brushstrokes protruding from her hand (which she shot in an 1888 These theories can be seen to originate from both Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner’s notion of ‘betwixt and between’ and Mary Douglas’ (as well as others who have drawn on Emile Durkheim’s work) concern with ‘matter out of place’ and the pollution that can be attached to beings that fail to fit into a classificatory category.

9 Paradoxically, the term liminality here reveals the deeper complexities of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ‘bricolage’, categorising the space that lies between ‘ill’ and ‘healthy’.

10As Quoted in Görgen. 2007, 15.

11 As quoted in Schneede. 2007, 35. From a letter to Einer Reuter, 4th December 1921.

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hunting accident). Thus, both artists employ painterly forms as a fruitful landscape for emotional subconcious sense-making. Indeed, as Ahtola-Moorhouse (2007:28) notes: “...scratches, sections rubbed out, colour accents and sharp lines, all express a desire to conjure up the subconscious in her works. In painting Schjerfbeck experienced a kind of inner turmoil...” Here, it is useful to consider an idea included in The Mindful Body (a key text in Medical Anthropology) in which Scheper-Hughes and Lock propose emotions as an important missing link “capable of bridging mind and body, individual, society, and body politic,” (1987:29). In this way, emotions have the power to transform knowledge into intense human understanding; interpreting emotion in artworks is no different. The passion displayed by Schjerfbeck in the scratched surface of her portrait signifies her physicality, drawing attention to her real body and denying her imaged Self. Thus, the frustrated artist’s mental and physical pains are revealed through intense emotional mark-making. Moreover, while this painting is peripheral, hidden on the back of another (conveying her awkward introversion), it is interesting that she did not throw it away altogether; perhaps she did in fact want somebody at some point to find, to see, to feel, to understand the legitimacy of her pain and free her from her liminal cage.

From Fig.1: Self-Portrait (1878) to Fig.30: Last Self-Portrait (1945), Schjerfbeck projected multiple selves; embracing Modernism and her subconscious, she progressively blurred the image of her face into abstraction, handling her materials with an increasing malleability. As medical anthropologist Ewing (1998:296) argues: “in all cultures people can be observed to project multiple, inconsistent Self-representations that are context-dependent and may shift rapidly.” Diverging increasingly further away from the reality found in photographs, Schjerfbeck denied her mirror image, instead painting her oscillating experiences of mental and physical pain, pains invisible to the naked eye. Schjerfbeck wrote: “I try to draw a sharp boundary around art, not to let it cross over into reality.” 12 Thus, she perhaps used her self-portraits to explore another sphere of her Self and escape the reality of her liminality; moulding her own future interpretations as well as those by art historians with each new Self she painted. As Lock (1993:134) notes, “since closer attention has been paid to bodily representation, the body has become more elusive, fluid, and uncontrollable.”

This statement illustrates a parallel of fluidity between Schjerfbeck’s imaged Self and the writings of medical anthropological theory. Paintings such as Fig.19: Self-Portrait with Red Spot (1944) reveal a blurred space between two of Schjerfbeck’s imaged selves with an embrace of distortion akin to Edvard Munch’s Fig.32: Self-Portrait with Spanish Flu (1919).

Ultimately, the multiple variations of her Self and the blurring of facial characteristics can be seen as extensions of the concealment and performance properties of masks. 13 Indeed, the accented eye sockets and angular jaw lines in Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits certainly reveal an intrigue with masks even before considering the overt mask-like features in paintings such as Fig.33: Girl in Rocking Chair (1910). Here it is fruitful to introduce Norwegian anthropologist Wikan’s (2000: 220) experience of a detached retina: “I live in a society where it is not normal or natural to expose one's private life,” going on to explain that those in pain “keep a mask,” (2000:233). Thus, a sense of shame surrounding illness in Scandinavia is made known (a feeling that is found in numerous cultures). In this way, the absence of Schjerfbeck’s true appearance in her late self-portraits finally reveals her pain but shields her from experiencing the associated shame. Through painterly ‘masks’ she is able to gaze at her aging deathly image without fear from Fig.29: Self-Portrait, Mask (1945) to Fig.25: SelfPortrait, En gammal målarinna (1945). Blurring her illness identity with her identity as an old woman, these masked selves suspend her in a continual liminality, propelling her physiognomy into the ambiguous liminal ether.

As quoted in Görgen. 2007, 14. From a letter c. 1920, quoted in cat. Copenhagen/Hamburg 1983, 38.

(2002:45) disagrees: “I do not see divergence from ‘mimesis’ as such as signifying that the artist puts on a mask to face an intrusive world. This hypothesis would lead to the conclusion that all Modernist self-portraits, for example, wear a mask...”

12

13Ahtola-Moorhouse

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Further negotiations of Schjerfbeck’s liminal status are found in the compartmentalisation of her body, which allude to incompleteness and a fragmented sense of Self. Repeatedly she detaches her head, face and bust from her broken body, interrogating this area with striking intimacy. Not only this, but the asymmetry with which she addresses her face, obscuring her left side in the majority of her self-portraits, reveals a denial of her injured side. 14 As anthropologist Polunin (1977:92) notes, “the face is the most important site from which visual information on the bodily state can be conveyed.” If this is the case, her face is all that is needed to portray her pain. However, the very absence of her body suggests her acute awareness of it, and in turn, leads the viewer to question its condition.

Despite the Cartesian separation of mind and body, ideas of wholeness are evidently still rooted in people today (Lundin 1999:7). In this way, the distress caused by decapitation or “penis snatching” (Sharp 2000:294) illustrates the importance of the body and all that it contains as a symbol of individual existence. Images of Schjerfbeck reveal only partial selves.

Fig.34, from the summer of 1918, shows an atypical photograph of Schjerfbeck standing and exposing an awkward stoop. It seems a most extraordinary coincidence, then, that together with a wooden bench blocking the cameras view of her lower legs, an inexplicable blurry smudge threatens to engulf her physiognomy. In painted form, the most dramatic example of Schjerfbeck’s dislocation is found in Fig.20: Self-Portrait with Palette II (1937-45).

Schjerfbeck paints her partial Self embedded on a muddy background, her torso cut off with a dramatic black line. It is made absolutely clear that she never intended to paint her dislocated body. Here, a comparable image is found with Borisov-Musatov’s Fig.35: Portrait of the Artist with his Sister (1898) in which the humpbacked Russian portrays himself awkwardly and stiffly in the corner of the painting slicing vertically through his injured spine while placing his able-bodied sister in the centre, thus painting a partial, peripheral, liminal Self.

What is more, the flat cosmological planes of pastel colour within which Schjerfbeck painted her Self are vital to a discussion of her liminality. These empty spaces are perhaps akin to what Jackson (1994:224) called the “province of pain,” in her suggestion of pain forcing sufferers to create new world images. Schjerfbeck’s new blank world is anywhere, from Finland to the landscapes of her mind. Here, it is interesting to consider Yayoi Kusama’s performance (Fig.36: -Obliteration by Dots (1968)) which purposely used settings to interact with and meld into her hallucinatory, obsessive Self. If we are to agree with Görgen (2007:10), Schjerfbeck’s backgrounds provide a similarly connective quality: “however isolated the depicted form... may seem against the background, it is nevertheless closely bound up with this background in the flat pictorial space.” This ‘flat’ space brings Schjerfbeck’s bust into sharp focus, the simple pastel backgrounds pushing her to the front of the canvas in an atmosphere of silent interaction. The largest exception to these simply coloured backgrounds is found in Fig.7: Self-Portrait with Black Background (1915) in which a pot of paint, a brush and her name in faded white behind her head (signifying a gravestone) are included. Contemplating death, she paints her imaged Self liminally positioned between her living, breathing Self (now the viewer) and her looming grave.

THE WEAKNESS OF WOMAN: ILLNESS AS A CATALYST FOR GENDERED IDENTITY

As Görgen (2007:46) notes, Schjerfbeck's life and work have not yet been examined in the context of gender research. However, by piecing various fragments together, a picture of her culturally constructed gender can be discerned (and continued into the next chapter’s subject of intersubjectivity). Moreover, an examination of this construction proves fruitful in illuminating the constitution of her illness identity. While she enjoyed relative freedom 14As

suggested to me by Leena Ahtola-Moorhouse, Schjerfbeck’s paintings document her mirror image. Thus, her apparent right side is in fact her mirrored left.

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between the ages of eighteen and twenty eight, living abroad on her own or with fellow female painters, Holger (1992:56) describes Schjerfbeck’s life thereafter in plain terms as an unmarried maiden living with her mother: “Helene loathed housework... Day in and day out she was forced to abstain from what she most wanted to do - paint. This naturally gave rise to an inner conflict which periodically erupted in palpable physical symptoms.” Her family and household commitments, her distinctively female roles, are thus portrayed as detrimental to her health. Moreover, it seems Schjerfbeck was reluctant to accept this feminine role. Yet, Holger (1992:59) also suggests her depiction of the world of women, “helped the healing process after her illness and depression.”

Nevertheless, when interpreting Schjerfbeck’s paintings, it is important not to fall into a biographical trap. As Lomas (in Adler & Pointon 1993:5) debates, in relation to Frida Kahlo, autobiographical paintings such as Fig.37: The Broken Column (1944) drive historians to focus on biography. He suggests that “biography is a mode of trivialising art produced by women,” excluding wider political import and transferring biographical facts into literal interpretations of paintings and painter. Similarly, Salomon (in Pollock 2006:107) claims that in art history, Artemisia Gentileschi’s works are “reduced to therapeutic expressions of her repressed fear, anger and/or desire for revenge. Her creative efforts are compromised, in traditional terms, as personal and relative.” Moreover, cultural perceptions of the feminine as weak and the masculine as strong have predictably diffused into art historical writings.

For example, Görgen (2007:41) writes that Schjerfbeck did occasionally “present herself as belonging to the ‘weaker’ sex,” and goes on to quote the artist herself: “that which lies innermost - passion - is what I would like to reveal, but then one becomes ashamed and is unable to conjure it up - because one is a woman.” Here, Schjerfbeck appears submissive, masquerading as a stereotype of her gender. Acutely aware of her gendered identity, she wrote to Helena Westermarck on the June 1914: “I have wanted for some time to be able to write... about what life has to offer a woman, as with every experience she gets a little lower, a little more demeaned until she is desperate...” 15 Here she exposes the painful passivity of her gender and the feelings of desperation that accompany it. In this way, her submission builds on the structure of her illness identity with notions of her ‘weak’ gender.

While Broom (1995:109) argues that “being ill involves being to some extent feminised,” I argue that in reaction to the feminine connotations of ill-health, Schjerfbeck increasingly leaned towards androgyny in her self-portraits. In early works such as Fig.3: Self-Portrait (1884/85), Schjerfbeck portrays herself at her most feminine; her blonde hair appears fluffy and curls at the fringe, her cheeks are imbued with a touch of pink, her eyes are painted delicately with a glimmering blue and a gentle curve defines her breasts.

However, as in all of her self-portraits, she bares a solemn expression, her hair is tied back and her clothing is plain, suggestive of neither gender. Indeed, Ahtola-Moorhouse (2002:40) suggests that even the 1884/85 portrait “can be characterised as robust,” with “a touch of ‘masculinity’...” In later works, such as Fig.6: Self-Portrait with Silver Background (1915), her hair is boyish, painted in solid areas of colour, her skin appears pale, her pupils become enlarged black orifices, her jaw line becomes sharp with thick lines and her breasts are flattened. Then, finally, in works such as Fig.22 Self-Portrait, Saltsjöbaden (1944 or 1945), her hair disappears altogether revealing a perfectly un-gendered skull not dissimilar from Claude Cahun’s provocatively genderless Fig.38: Self-Portrait (c.1920). I interpret these androgynous inclinations as a symptom of Schjerfbeck’s deteriorating physical strength which distanced her from the socially respected masculine; her increasing resolve to appear androgynous thereby illustrates a rejection of the expected weaknesses of her illness and gender. On August 1911 Schjerfbeck wrote to Helena Westermarck 16 : “the only thing I wish for with women's right to vote is a smoothing out of men and women, for in no other way 15 16

As quoted in Holger. 1992, 56.

A pioneer of the women's movement in Finland.

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will this affect us,” [italics added]. 17 Hence, downplaying her femininity, she painted her Self as strong willed and professional, staring out from the canvas in fixed determination in an attempt to overcome her physical weaknesses and attain her desired equality with men.

Studying the relationship between work and chronic pain, DelVecchio Good (1992:51)18 suggested that “for women, work outside the home of any sort, but in particular professional work, contributes to mental and physical health.” Therefore, I suggest Schjerfbeck’s increasingly androgynous self-portraits accompany her experiences of empowerment and competence wielding a paint brush. This emphasis on strength is paralleled in Werner’s (2004:1035) study of women with chronic muscular pain. The women described their own (positive) strength in opposition to the (negative) illness of others in an attempt to verify the credibility of their pain as authentic. Thus, Werner argues, the establishment of their strength rejects “discourse of the crazy, lazy, illness-fixed or weak woman.” Nevertheless, in emphasising their strength and therefore masculinising their identity, it must be suggested that these women, including Schjerfbeck, ultimately deny facets of their suffering and Self identity.

As quoted in Ahtola-Moorhouse. 2007, 26.

DelVecchio Good (1992:49-50) characterises divergences from “work-stress-pain” associations as (1) work as a haven from pain and loss, (2) work as an arena for self-realisation and effective performance, and (3) work as a vehicle for control over the intrusiveness and daily disruptiveness of pain.

17 18

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CHAPTER II AN INTERSUBJECTIVE PRESENTATION OF PAIN “an intersubjective understanding of our relations with others has it that from the beginning we are only ourselves in relation to another, ” (Skaife 2001:42).

My use of the term intersubjective in this chapter indicates not only the shared subjective states between the painter and viewer, but also the perception that, within a single painting, Schjerfbeck simultaneously operates two subjective definitions of the scene portrayed.

Further to this, the discrepancies in meaning with which she engages have been subject to multiple art historical interpretations. Thus, her paintings and their interpretations do not result in shared definitions, but partially shared, shifting definitions that in turn, reflect the shifting natures of Self and pain. In addition to this outline, it is important to consider that “art is always a response to other art, as without it as a known language we cannot use that language,” (Skaife 2001:45). Thus, Görgen (i.2007:12) argues that Schjerfbeck’s encounters with the old masters copied in her youth and the monochrome reproductions in art books and journals helped her “view her own subject from a distance, to visualise them against the background of her existing ideas and moods and to paint them in such a way that they frequently went beyond the concrete portrait or specific landscape to become intensely expressive symbols of fundamentally human and atmospheric qualities.” In this way, this chapter explores a selection of Schjerfbeck’s ‘hidden’ self-portraits and the consequences of these intersubjective relationships for interpretations of illness, loneliness, pain and suffering.

THE EFFEMINATE WOUNDED SOLDIER: QUESTIONS OF INTERSUBJECTIVE GENDER

Fig.39: The Wounded Soldier in the Snow (1880) is, at its core, a painting depicting bitter loneliness, physical incapability and the relationship between the two. The young soldier lays wounded in the foreground leaning against a birch tree 19 which, together with his own form, creates a striking compositional curve. It seems particularly significant that the birch (an emblem of natural strength) is drooping, almost horizontal; leading the viewer’s eye to the horizon where his fellow troops are disappearing into the distance.

Physical pain is therefore portrayed as a direct cause of loneliness here. Indeed, numerous art historians have employed an autobiographical understanding to the seemingly inconspicuous soldier. With his soft blonde hair, blushing cheeks and elegant features, it is argued that the 18 year old Schjerfbeck simultaneously paints the realities of a melancholic war scene and, her own despondent loneliness. Thus, she exposes her own liminal subjectivity via the male soldier who has been abandoned by his healthy (‘normal’) colleagues. As Janzen (2002:118) asserts, illness commonly brings with it a major redefinition of Self, “this redefinition is usually strongly mirrored in those who are fellow sufferers.” Thus, here, it can be suggested that Schjerfbeck realises her own loneliness only when faced with the wounded soldier’s isolation. Lena Holger (in Sinisalo 1992:11)20 corroborates the intersubjective interpretation by introducing Schjerfbeck’s autobiographical script for Gösta Stenman. In this, Schjerfbeck refers to her depressed state of mind at the time she painted the Wounded Soldier, a period shortly after her teacher Adolf von Becker and friend Helena Westermarck had departed for Paris. Thus, it seems crucial that the subject she chose to paint during these feelings of abandonment and loneliness did in fact place blame on physical inabilities.

19 In suggesting that Schjerfbeck’s trees are “rather like people - full of emotion, fragile, yet with a hint of elegiac expressivity,” Sinisalo (2002:12) introduces a further subjectivity to the painting, providing the birch (object) with expression (subjective action).

20 Unfortunately, both Holger, L. 1987. Helene Schjerfbeck, Liv och Konstnärskap where these connections are made and Johannson, G. 1940. Helene Schjerfbeck's Konst where the autobiographical information is included are only available in the national languages of Finland.

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Nevertheless, Schjerfbeck’s displaced gender in theses interpretations has been somewhat overlooked and demands analysis. While the strong androgynous figures in her late self-portraits arrive with power and conviction on the canvas; separate from their unadorned backgrounds, the wounded soldier blends softly into the effeminate landscape: laying flaccidly, passive amongst hues of powdery blue. It seems strange that Schjerfbeck chose such a masculine theme, only to feminise it with the soldier’s delicate features, dappled brushstrokes and soft pastel colours. Why would she choose to paint a male subject/theme in this time of loneliness? Did she believe a soldier’s pain best represented her own?

Fighting an impossible battle? Did she mean to make women appear stronger and men weaker? Would her contemporaries have empathised more with the pain of a man fighting for their nation? Is a woman’s pain undervalued because it is a regular and natural bodily experience (menstruation, childbirth)? I suggest that Schjerfbeck utilises drag to transfer the expected weakness of her illness and gender (as discussed in the previous chapter) onto a military male subject in order to disguise her personal experience of loneliness. Del la Grace Volcano’s Fig.40: Jax Revealed, London (1991) is a striking photograph within this context.

Masculine army uniform is being removed from Jax’s torso to reveal feminine breasts; a parallel process to the interpretative undressing of the soldier as Schjerfbeck. Moulding his gendered/‘other’ identity through his website, Volcano’s artistic statement is also useful in considering the potential fluidity of gender here: “I access 'technologies of gender' in order to amplify rather than erase the hermaphroditic traces of my body. I name myself. A gender abolitionist.” 21 Indeed, just as the Self and its relations to others and the world are contextually bound, the body emerges not with a given gender but with a gender deriving from subjective meanings in a variety of contexts. Therefore, it is useful to introduce Butler’s (1993:231) theories of gender as performative: “gender is an ...assignment which is never quite carried out according to expectation, whose addressee never quite inhabits the ideal s/he is compelled to approximate...” In this way, Butler explains, performativity is citationality; the performance of gender is not natural or voluntary but located within ‘regulative discourses’. Thus, Schjerfbeck performs via the cited discourse of history painting. Indeed, Konttinen (in Sinisalo 1992:11) argues that the painting is a plain response to the 1808 Finnish War. Yet, having been painted at a time when Finnish art authorities commended idealism in history painting, her blunt choice of subject is highly controversial and thus comparable with the subjects of Vasily Vereshchagin. Taking the censored Fig.41: Left Behind (1871) as an example, a Russian soldier lies dead with his arms and legs sprawled out across the ground while scavenging birds encircle him. Schjerfbeck’s piece is softer by comparison and, as a woman, it is unlikely that she witnessed such a scene herself. As Sinisalo (1992:11) argues, historical motifs were “unusual for a woman artist. Here again, Schjerfbeck decided to be seen as a complete equal with her male colleagues. Her goal was certainly achieved...”

Taking the intersubjective interpretation of the Wounded Soldier a step further, Schjerfbeck’s personal pains and emotions can be seen to transcend all persons and gender boundaries so that any of her paintings (beyond her self-portraits) can in fact be interpreted as intersubjective transferences of her Self. 22 In his famous studies of dreams and organisation of the psyche, Freud (in Ewing 1998: 305) noted that the semiotic processes of condensation, identification, and transference all rely on forms of metaphor to organise human experience. Although somewhat outdated, his theories are useful in that Schjerfbeck’s utilisation of transference through the externalising process of painting establishes her within an intersubjective field. In this way Sarajas-Korte (1992:35) argues: “over time, Schjerfbeck’s portraits began to look less and less like their sitters... they portray Schjerfbeck more vividly than her models.” Yet, it must be questioned whether this argument includes her earlier, perhaps less Self-concious, history paintings such as The Wounded Soldier.

21 22

As quoted at Volcano, D. 2005. http://www.dellagracevolcano.com/statement.html. Accessed 2/10/2010.

As is the case with any portrait; the artist portrays the sitter via their own subjective visualisation.

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Certainly, it was 23 years before she wrote to Maria Wiik, in 1913, of her musings on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray: “...the artist painted himself in every exquisite portrait, the sitter was incidental... he made him fall in love with his own beauty. I believe that we, too, do evil.” 23 BLACKENED FRUIT: MIRRORING DECAY AND OBJECTIFYING PAIN

Examining Schjerfbeck’s widely overlooked still lifes, my discussion on intersubjectivity now turns to her objectification of pain. The images of fruit painted towards the end of her life have repeatedly been interpreted by art historians as reflections of her Self. For example, as Görgen (i.2007:10) articulates, Schjerfbeck’s “late still lives can be interpreted as an echo of the artist’s struggle to come to terms with growing old.” Via the blackening decay of painted fruit Schjerfbeck is thus seen to objectify her aging Self, the pains of her final years and her elderly body and mind. In this way, pain is given a metaphorical visual quality and, as something separate from the human body, can be categorised as ‘object’. Thus, Schjerfbeck’s subjective pain becomes objectified twofold, as rotting fruit and as a painted image (paint/canvas). Here, a paradox of intersubjective objectivity is created as art historians and viewers continue to interpret and engage with the subjects (Schjerfbeck and her pain) and the objects (the fruit and the canvas, the paint) of the work. In Fig.42, Schjerfbeck is photographed in her apartment at Tammisaari gazing at Fig.43: Pumpkins (1937) as if captivated by a mirror. The composition of this photograph therefore proves striking when considering Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’ (in Butler 1993:138) whereby the ego is mirrored “in a fictional direction.” Moreover, this behaviour is very much in line with the pervasive understanding within anthropology that “the human body generates a host of potent metaphorical constructions for ordering the world,” (Sharp 2000:315). In the metaphorical construction provided by rotting fruit, Schjerfbeck’s ‘objectified pain’ enables her to regain control of her subjectivity. In the same way, Jackson (1994:205) noted during her fieldwork that certain therapies encouraged patients to objectify their pain, “by pain imaging... patients readily speak of their pain as sea serpents, crabs, mediaeval weapons.” Therefore, objectification and transference have come to be established as legitimate modes of healing. Sariola (1992:89) introduces a deeper complexity to this in her suggestion that the disintegrating reality in Fig.44: Still Life with Blackening Apples (1944) attempts to heal two disparate wounds. Firstly, Schjerfbeck’s deteriorating health and secondly a Europe bruised and battered by World War II. However, unlike with the Wounded Soldier, Schjerfbeck is now engaging with inanimate objects, removed from images of human war or pain and free from any initial individual subjectivity. A similarity is found here, in the wake of modern medicine, with the terms ‘vegetable’ and ‘cabbage’ being used as lay modes of describing the severely brain damaged. Suspended in a ‘vegetative’ state, these persons provide an ironic parallel to Schjerfbeck’s utilisation of fruit as Self (especially when considering the prevailing stillness and silence in the majority of her works). In both cases, organic matter constitutes the make-up of the chosen surrogate objects. Like the human body (and unlike a medieval weapon), fruits and vegetables are vulnerable to disease (mould/mildew/blight), misfortune (being dropped/invaded by insects), growing old (wrinkling) and death (decaying). In this way, Schjerfbeck easily transferred and objectified her bodily experiences into objects with similar susceptibilities.

Museum value systems applied to objects such as Still Life with Blackening Apples (1944) further complicate and extend the objectification of Schjerfbeck’s pain, in whatever imaginative form it has emerged. Painted fragments of her Self have been kept, collected and admired for their beauty, age and uniqueness. Indeed, as Clifford (1985: 241) asserts, “old objects are endowed with a sense of ‘depth’ by their historically minded collectors.

Temporality is reified and salvaged as beauty and knowledge.” However, because of the difficulties Schjerfbeck faced as an impoverished and ‘lame’ woman, I would argue that her 23

As quoted in Sarajas-Korte. 1992, 35-6.

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work has been bestowed further value. Retrospectively, these created/accumulated objects are valued intersubjectively as the products of her individual experience of illness. Her suffering face, fruit, women and historical figures are all interpreted as objectifications of her Self. In this way, paintings such as Still Life with Blackening Apples (1944) can also be seen as extensions of Schjerfbeck’s body. As extensions of her body, her paintings reveal what Blacking (1977:24) describes as “long-term patterns of interaction between social bodies and their environment that transcend what seemed to be more immediately pressing socioeconomic realities.” Indeed, viewers continue to interact with Schjerfbeck to this day.

Nevertheless, now embedded within museum value systems, the danger that Schjerfbeck’s paintings may come to stand for abstract wholes of her life or illness must be treated with considerable caution.

THE CONVALESCENT AND TEMPORAL SPACE

Fig.45: The Convalescent (1888), in contrast to the decaying fruit, is one of Schjerfbeck’s most admired, most studied themes. Thus, the material written in English on this subject is substantial. After painting the original in 1888 the artist returned to the theme throughout her life. Again, numerous art historians have interpreted the recovering child as Schjerfbeck herself. 24 The lower body of the child is wrapped in bandage-like white sheets; hiding but at the same time drawing attention to the source of Schjerfbeck’s anguish, her hip. Importantly, Schjerfbeck “examines her life through the eyes of adult and child simultaneously,” (Sinisalo 1992:9-11) thus engaging with her current subjectivity and the subjectivity of her past. John Bellany’s screenprint Fig. 49: Janus (1982) provides an interesting comparison here. Depicting the Roman god of doors, gates and entrances with his two faces, one looking to the past, and the other to the future, the Scottish artist created this piece in a time of great emotional pain and concern for his health, thus he transforms a classic Roman image into a self-portrait. Both Bellany and Schjerfbeck look inwards on themselves, desperately searching for who they were, who they have been and who they will become as they hide behind the subjectivites of their sitters. Here, Polunin’s (1977:90) assertion that “the state of health of an individual at any one time can be thought of as the effects of past and present interactions between the individual, his behaviour, and the total environment,” is key. As Schjerfbeck was crippled in early childhood, her subsequent experience of pain and interactions are seen to stem from this point in time. Thus, intersubjective interpretations of The Convalescent are tangled with Schjerfbeck’s past-laden temporality.

Sarajas-Korte (1992:25) suggests that while re-evoking a traumatic experience from her past, Schjerfbeck retains “a calculated distance between herself and the spectator.” In this case, it is time that creates the distance (just as it is objectification in the case of the fruit and transformative gender in the case of The Wounded Soldier), reaffirming her past Self as other and liminal in contrast to her own present subjectivity. Like many art historians interpreting this painting, Sinisalo (1992:9-11) emphasises the fact that “many of her life's misfortunes, including a broken engagement, were to result from her disability.” Indeed, her readings of the 1888 painting prove inseparable from the artist’s broken engagement: “although Schjerfbeck was unwilling to speak about her ill-fated engagement for years after, in the painting she was able to let out her feelings and put the matter behind her.” This argument seems all the more compelling when taking into account Ahtola-Moorhouse’s (1992:67) revelation that the reason for the broken engagement given by her fiancé, “was that he believed her deformed hip to be tubercular.” Therefore, in recreating a Self beyond her present temporality, The Convalescent “gave her the chance to grieve and recover from According to the Finnish National Gallery (Ateneum) Audio Guide the painting was originally called The First Green and there are nine different versions as well as a substantial number of lithographs. As heard at http://www.ateneum.fi/collections/audioguide. Accessed 14/12/2010.

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her sense of inadequacy.” Thus, perhaps the true pain of physical illness is only revealed though our social relationships and the effect it has on them. With this reading of the painting, the state of her health during her childhood is seen to directly impact her subjective present; blocking possible future subjectivities she focuses on the past. It is interesting then that Handler and Wade (in Clifford 1985:242) suggest that culture and ‘artistic authenticity’ have “as much to do with an inventive present as with a past, its objectification, preservation, or revival.” Schjerfbeck’s repeated objectification, preservation and revival of her past in The Convalescent persuades of the importance of this theme and, consequently, the authenticity of her initial pain. Zago (2008:316), as a clinically trained art therapist argues that pictorial images are indicative of perceived, internalised ways of having been seen, received and held in childhood. In this way, Schjerfbeck can again be seen to cultivate an illness identity. Yet, Sinisalo (1992:16) suggests that in the later studies, a measure of the original pathos has been eliminated with the angular lines making the fragile cripple “alert and energetic,” as can perhaps be seen in the 1945 version (Fig.48) painted in the year running up to her death. If this is the case, it can be suggested that Schjerfbeck’s subjective approach towards her past Self was shifting as she moved through temporal space.

This is highlighted in Fig.9: Self-Portrait (1913-1926) which Schjerfbeck began in 1913 and reworked in 1926. Painting grey over grey in oil, watercolour and charcoal, Schjerfbeck said of this painting: “I'm completing a picture of my young self by sticking my old mouth on it now I'm free.”25 Schneede (2007:36) interprets this overpainting as an increased angularity to the mirrored left side of her face (the side of her injured hip), thus creating “the appearance of an injury or an object that has been unsuccessfully repaired... transitoriness thus becomes the main subject of the painting simply through the pictorial layering of young and old.”

Furthermore, Schjerfbeck’s multiple paintings of children such as in Fig.50: By the Window (1883) can be interpreted as projections of her past selves and subjectivities. The child stands at the window, reaching out towards the outside world with tiny fingers pressed against the window frame. An interpretation here might be that she is trapped inside by the limitations of her incomplete body (Schjerfbeck’s liminal cage). Nevertheless, Mattingly’s (1994:818) argument that “always we are situated with an eye to the future and that future saturates each present moment with meaning,” emphasises the underlying human anxiety about the unpredictable future Self. This argument suggests to me that Schjerfbeck may have taken refuge in images of children (her past Self) in order to reject her present pains and subjectivities. However, while Schjerfbeck excluded her body from her ‘conscious’ selfportraits, in The Convalescent, the torso (despite being wrapped up) has a strong physical presence and in this way, moving through temporal space has allowed her to recreate her body’s infirmity.

Having made her illness, loneliness, pain and suffering into concrete objects, Schjerfbeck ensured her pain could be felt by peoples born after her own death. We return here to the theories of Kleinman (1998:201), as ultimately “ethnographers enter the stream of social experience at a particular time and place.” Thus, the descriptions and interpretations contained within this text represent a cross-sectional slice through the changing structures of relevance and ongoing priorities in art historical and anthropological writings. Interpreting Durkheim’s theories of society as a system of active forces, Blacking (1977:8) suggests that ‘active forces’ imply “powers of sensory awareness, or resonance and of communication between the individual parts of the social organism.” Though dead, Schjerfbeck remains an ‘active force’ as art historians continue to interpret her paintings, Self and pain to the extent that her subjectivity is maintained and extended as, indeed, it will be with this text. Through intersubjective interpretations of her suffering, the viewer is invited to consider the endlessness of its effect on interpreting her oeuvre. Is every 25

As quoted in Schneede. 2007, 36. From a letter to Einar Reuter, 3rd October 1926.

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Schjerfbeck painting an image of her Self? Here, Kleinman (1998:202) is again useful in his assertion that biomedical accounts of illness have been criticised for ignoring the experience of suffering. Thus, in order to depict suffering, “anthropological accounts disclose how the idiosyncrasies and divided interests and cross-purposes of personal life lived under the strenuous constraint of disease processes are actually culturally patterned into recognisably shared forms.” To accomplish this analytic feat the illness experience is frozen at a certain moment, in the case of The Convalescent, Schjerfbeck freezes her illness at the point of its conception.

This discussion of temporal space and its organisation thus leads us to the next chapters’ subject of narrative. As Ricoeur (in Good 1994:143) explains, “reading response theorists have elaborated on the temporal and intersubjective qualities of all narrative by giving special attention to the ‘phenomenology of the act of following a story,’” In this way, narrative and the narratives provided in and by art works are not presented as completed stories; the story must be appropriated by the reader or viewer. Therefore, the reader/viewer’s task is interpretation (the very subject of this text) to elucidate potential meanings. This is just what has happened with images such as The Wounded Soldier, the blackened fruit and The Convalescent. It is not Schjerfbeck who has formed our interpretation of her Self, her pain, her suffering and illness; it is the combination of both Schjerfbeck’s subjectivity and those of art historians. Moreover, as Kleinman & Kleinman (1998:212) assert:

“We live in the flow of daily experience: we are intersubjective forms of memory and action.

Our experiences are so completely integrated - narrativised moments, transforming narratives - that the self is constituted out of visceral processes as much as expressed through them.”

Indeed, stories are not just told after experience but are constructed while people are still very much in the midst of action. Schjerfbeck was always in action, always in pain and yet she shifted her temporal subjectivity in order to engage with the pains of her past.

Returning to the Norwegian anthropologist Wikan’s (2000:215-217) illness narrative here is useful in her argument that “the beginning is the turning point-the end is simply what then happened or how it all went,” therefore, the beginning marks her narrative. I would argue that this also seems to have been the case for Schjerfbeck. The Convalescent provides a confident narrative with the child set back from the foreground she is contextualised, delicately perched on the edge of the large wicker chair; a vision of innocent fragility. In contrast, her final self-portraits reveal a tortured struggle to create a definitive end, thus her engagement with present temporal realities appears to have proved more problematic, perhaps too personal.

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CHAPTER III THE NARRATIVE ENVELOPMENT OF IMAGED SUFFERING Both Schjerfbeck and Art Historians have created numerous narratives in order to negotiate her corporeal vulnerability; a breach of the ordinary that demanded to be shaped. What is more, the repeated scrutinisation of narrative in medical anthropology has meant “greater analytic attention to the particular case, in all its particularity,” Mattingly 1998:10). In this way, a micro-ethnographic approach of Helene Schjerfbeck is particularly conducive to gaining a sense of her ‘illness story’. Mattingly (1998:8) boldly identifies three features of narrative form that make it so appropriate for dealing with illness experiences:

“One, narratives are event-centred. They concern action, more specifically human action, even more specifically, human interaction. They concern social doings. Two, narratives are experience-centred. They do not merely describe what someone does in the world but what the world does to that someone. They allow us to infer something about what it feels like to be in that story world. Narratives also recount those events that happen unwilled, unpredicted, and often unwished for by the actors, even if those very actors set the events in motion in the first place. Narratives, one could say, are about the unintended consequences of action (Arendt 1958). Three, narratives do not merely refer to past experience but create experiences for their audience. Narratives mean to be provocative. They request a different response from the audience than denotative prose. Narrative offers meaning through evocation, image, the mystery of the unsaid. It persuades by seducing the listener into the world it portrays, unfolding events in a suspense-laden time in which one wonders what will happen next.”

In dissecting this exert from Mattingly, it becomes clear that narrative in lingual or written form is not so different from the visual narratives unmasked by art historians. In this way, Mattingly’s three features of narrative can be mapped onto paintings such as The Convalescent. One, The Convalescent is event-centred. It concerns the human action of Schjerfbeck’s recuperation and, at another level, the human action taken by Schjerfbeck to paint this event, each actioned brushstroke building up an evocative scene of an early childhood event. Two, The Convalescent is experience-centred. It does not merely describe what Schjerfbeck did in the world but also what the world did to her. The painting is highly emotive, the artist depicting herself as a young girl with teary eyes, trapped alone in a white sheet and coming to terms with her new found ‘sick role’. In this way, the painting infers something about what it feels like to be in her story world. Her broken hip (an unpredictable event, unwished for by Schjerfbeck) has isolated her; illuminating the unintended consequences of action. Three, The Convalescent does not merely refer to past experience but creates an experience for its audience. This painting means to be provocative. It offers pathos and meaning through evocation, image and the mystery of the unsaid. It persuades by seducing the viewer into the world of the fragile child, unfolding an event in a suspense-laden time in which one wonders what will happen next. Here however, unlike in lingual or written narrative, it is the viewer, the art historian (the interpreter) who continues the story and unravels its complexities as, ultimately, paintings invariably show a single, momentary glimpse of the artist’s ‘story’.

Crucially, Mattingly’s ideas can be mapped onto any one of Schjerfbeck’s paintings, a sequence of paintings, or, indeed, her entire oeuvre at once. Therefore, I argue that while the process of artistic practice is comparable to the process of narrative in dealing with illness experiences, the role of art historical analysis is crucial for the narrative within such a painting to be established. Indeed, without art historical analysis, the young girl depicted in The Convalescent would appear in front of a passing viewer as a mere sitter for a portrait. In this way, Schjerfbeck’s paintings are interpreted by way of a fluid mesh of both visual and societal historical knowledge in order to construct a ‘seemingly successful’ illness narrative.

Therefore, this chapter considers readings of Schjerfbeck’s visual narrative beyond the conscious and subconscious self-portraits discussed in the previous chapters in order to illuminate the power of combining biographical narrative with interpretations of imaged 18

suffering. Subsequently, art historical narratives and vocabulary are deconstructed in more depth before Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain leads the discussion away from art history to explore Schjerfbeck’s reflexive relationship with literature and the illness narratives of others.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE SICK COW AND OTHER TALES OF RECUPERATIVE SELF

At first, Fig.51: Churchgoers (1895-1900) appears to be a painting illustrative of the cyclical nature of life with the child in the foreground and three women in the background representing three different ages of women. 26 However Sarajas-Korte (1992:27) suggests that the Realist style employed is combined with a heightened emotive content. In this interpretation of emotion she includes the fact that until 1899 the painting was called When the Cow Got Sick. The space occupied by the boy in the foreground was formerly filled by the head of a cow, and the prayer book pressed against the chest of the middle-aged woman was formerly a bottle of medicine. 27 In this way, she suggests that the alterations “could not disguise her original infirmity of purpose.” The narrative provided here subtly equates the painting with Schjerfbeck’s own infirmity and in so doing extends the viewers understanding of the work. Indeed, during the latter part of the 1890s, Schjerfbeck frequently fell ill with unexplained bouts of ‘influenza’ and infirmity, thus, Churchgoers can legitimately be interpreted as a visual narrative of Schjerfbeck’s recuperative Self. It is fruitful to extend this idea by comparing her with Bragge and Fenner’s (2009:26) case study ‘Hugh’, a 7 year old boy suffering from autism. ‘Hugh’ expressed his personal concerns through art, talking as he scrawled in ‘secret writing’ and then painting over it; “he talked excitedly when painting over these works about fixing things up and making them new.” In this way, the process of overpainting itself can be seen as therapeutic. Churchgoers instantly provides viewers with a narrative in so far as two images have been painted; the sick cow transforms into a youthful healthy boy while the medicine bottle becomes a prayer book, which, along with the title, imbues the scene with a sense of religiosity. In this way, I construct my own narrative by suggesting this transformation implies the healing power of faith.

If Schjerfbeck’s art is approached therapeutically, any one of her paintings can be interpreted as a reflection of her Self and her suffering (as already noted in regards to intersubjectivity). However, the images I address here are more overt. As Maclagen (2005:27) notes “figurative pictures invite obvious and familiar collaboration: they seem to hint at stories, and may indeed be expressly intended to depict narrative scenes. In art therapy these may be actual scenes (memories, dreams)...” Schjerfbeck’s early painting Fig.54: The Sickbed (1877-78), illustrates a conventional image of illness; an old man laying on his (death)bed surrounded by woeful spectators. Discussing the painting, Libeth Knif, the art curator at Ostrobothnian Museum where The Sickbed is located, informed me that the bright light falling on the dying man’s head emphasises the internal drama (in much the same way that chiaroscuro was used throughout the Renaissance) penetrating the external incident with a focused mental content. In this way, Knif argues that Schjerfbeck “creates a strong emotional charge”, which, when combined with biographical knowledge, again leads the viewer to question the artists emotional and physical health. As Kathy Battista argued in

Comparable to Hans Baldung Grien’s Fig.53: The Three Ages of Man and Death (c.1510) in its depiction of aging bodies.

27 As shown by Fig.52: När Kon Blef Sjuk (Också en Sommarsaga) (c.1899), a photograph used by Helena Westermarck to illustrate a story of the same title (When the cow fell sick (Also a Summer Saga)). It is unknown whether this was the original purpose of the piece or whether elements such as the clumsy baskets were added by another artist.

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her 2005 lecture Women Artists, Pain and Self-Portraiture, 28 that the bed often becomes ‘a framing device for pain’. While her argument is specifically in relation to female artists, I would suggest that the bed is a fixed symbolic structure within Western art as a site for expressing pain. Indeed, this is demonstrated with abundant examples from Schjerfbeck’s Scandinavian colleagues such as Johanne Kreb’s Fig.55: A Young Girl (Anna Koefoed) (1896).

It is striking, and indeed significant then that Schjerfbeck’s own famed image of an ill child (The Convalescent) sees the girl not in bed but sitting upright on a large wicker chair; it is the title, the written language, which provides the illness narrative, not the imaged bed. Once again Schjerfbeck is set apart.

Further images of suffering are found throughout Schjerfbeck’s oeuvre.

Autobiographical interpretations can be endlessly analysed but I believe it is her highly sensitive treatment of suffering (as something she personally experienced) and its relationship with colour, line and pose that creates such empathetic visualisations. Fig.56: Sorrow (Child of Heat, The Gipsy Woman) (1919) shows miserable devastation in a stark, hot landscape, bearing a striking resemblance to Van Gogh’s famous Fig.57: Sorrow (1882).

Fig.58: The Broken String (By the Rivers of Babylon...) (1890s) then tells a tale of discord, incompleteness and vulnerability. Paintings of her nurses such as Fig.59: Nurse I (Kaija Lahtinen) (1943) and Fig.60: Finnish Nurse III (Ester Räihä) (1943) are then seen to document her institutionalisation and entrapment in a world of healing. Furthermore, as the experience of chronic illness pushes the sufferer to become more aware of their corporeality, it is important to address Schjerfbeck’s treatment of death and mortality. To quote Mattingly (1998:1) again here: “chronic illness or severe disability, reveals much about how culture conceives life in time, being as a kind of becoming marked by transitions, transformations and the inexorable progress toward death.” In Fig.61: The Death of Wilhelm von Schwerin (1886), Fig.62: Funeral in Brittany (1884) and Fig.63: Nature Morte (c.1877) we see three early examples of her treatment of the subject. Tied by the constraints of Realism and an ‘academic’ painting style, these paintings seem far removed from the dramatised expressive self-portraits of her own demise in the 1940s, conveying, instead, a predictable respectful melancholy. In this way, small clues of Schjerfbeck’s suffering, from sick cows to sad, ill, curative and dead persons, are peppered throughout her oeuvre. What is more, bringing these visual fragments together creates a new, independent and entirely aesthetic narrative.

However, the fragmentary nature of these visual tales cannot be ignored. Kirmayer (2000:153) is useful here in his valuable discussion on broken narratives: “in acute illness, narratives are often fragmentary or undeveloped; where narratives are most coherent, they also may be formulaic and distant from sufferers’ experience.” What this text presents is a tapestry of fragmentary narratives, undeveloped glimpses into Schjerfbeck’s illness experience. Yet if the viewer knew and understood Schjerfbeck’s pain to the extent that, say for example we know Kahlo’s pain, the subject would be less worthy of investigation. The wealth of overt illness images and narratives offered up in cases such as Kahlo’s removes the viewer from her corporeal experience; the coherence leaves no room for further interpretation or empathy. Indeed, it is the very lack of coherence that makes Schjerfbeck’s pain so fascinating, so tangible. Kirmayer (200:171) further notes “psychodynamic theory argues that gaps in narrative may mask or hide a deeper narrative that is repressed or denied because of its painful substance.” Thus, I suggest that the lack of visual confrontation

28As

viewed at http://channel.tate.org.uk/#media:/media/37994921001/26617053001&list:/media/37994921001&context:/ channel/playlists. Accessed 22/08/2010.

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between Schjerfbeck and her suffering is in fact significant in its absence. 29 This ‘absence’ has consequently been sporadically filled with interpretive narrative.

SCHJERFBECK MYTHOLOGY? DECONSTRUCTING ART HISTORICAL NARRATIVE

As Good (1994:144) articulates, “narrative theory describes two aspects of plot: plot as the underlying structure of a story, and ‘emplotment’ as the activity of a reader or hearer of a story who engages imaginatively in making sense of the story.” In this way, narrative theory becomes relevant to the analysis of emplotment in illness narratives. In the case of Helene Schjerfbeck, viewers and art historians engage imaginatively with her paintings, letters and the evocative interpretations of others, and thus play an active role in the creation of illness meaning. Analysing the fragments and paintings of Schjerfbeck initiates a creative, intersubjective relationship between artist and viewer which is problematised by history: the temporal distance between the two subjects. In this way, it is important to question the manipulation of such fragments by Schjerfbeck, her friends, correspondences, critics, dealers, biographers (particularly Reuter), art historians and even recent enthusiasts who write about her life and work in their online blogs. As Kirmayer (et. al 2000:155) prudently notes, “even a few words of an isolated trope invoke a whole conceptual space or world.” Now that Helene only exists socially, not physically, her subjectivity has been reduced to the physical and social fragments she left embedded in the social and physical fabrics of the world. She no longer has active control over such fragments or, indeed, her own identity; her paintings and letters are now in the control of viewers and art historians.

In the appendix of this text I have compiled a selection of the narratives constructed by art historians in order to create a sense of the ‘myth’ surrounding Schjerfbeck. ‘Illness vocabulary’ such as ‘trauma,’ ‘fragility,’ ‘isolation,’ ‘handicapped,’ ‘plagued,’ ‘adversity’ and ‘crippled’ has then been italicised in order to emphasise the subtle but incessant constructions of Schjerfbeck as ‘ill’ and ‘other’. Looking to Kirmayer (2000:156-7) again:

“...once authorised and accepted, a story is retold and so persists, becomes stabilised, and influences further stories. This account points to the limitations of literary theory to address what, for medical anthropology, are the central problems in analysing illness narratives: the relationships of narrative to bodily experience and to social power,”

Indeed, as these narratives become increasingly convoluted, they gradually become detached from her bodily experience. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that Schjerfbeck herself initiated the narratives that now envelope her images with statements such as, “in 50 years not one single day of good health.” 30 In this way, the limitations of narrative are revealed. Therefore, I advocate a return to the images themselves. Indeed, I argue that while a sense of ‘mythology’ envelopes art historical writings, Schjerfbeck’s paintings reveal her pain as no myth; this was a passionate woman in liminal turmoil as she incessantly worked on her paintings, layering and scraping off paint, impressing her physicality onto the canvases. I suggest that in the future, images of pain, loneliness, illness and suffering be treated with a fluid, image-laden language; a creative narrative process that evokes feeling in the reader. As creativity and imagination is used to create the art itself, the narrative describing it should be equally imaginative in its elaborations and interpretations, as, indeed, Cathy Moon (in Maclagen 2005:26) recognises in relation to the dialogues between art therapists:

“A poetic-based language engages not only our intellect but our aesthetic sensibilities as well, calling forth our capacities for understanding based at an emphatic, experimental level.

Poetic language draws the listener in, inviting emphatic participation in that which is being described, and inviting authentic response...”

In his discussions on nationalism and the Israeli state Handelman (2004:148) notes that while death transforms presence into absence, memorialisation “embodies the shape and texture of this imprint on emptiness to create the presence of absence.” In the same way, the presence of Schjerfbeck’s paintings now reminds present-day viewers of her absence.

30As Quoted in Görgen. 2007, 15. From a letter to Einer Reuter, 22nd February 1927.

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BEYOND THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN. A STORY SATURATED IN ILLNESS.

In turning to Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, Schjerfbeck’s reflexive relationship with the literary narratives of others is considered in order to reveal the cyclicality of her narrative envelopment. Schjerfbeck’s love of literature is widely acknowledged, as AhtolaMoorhouse (2007: 29-30) articulates: “[literature] fed her imagination, provided her with topics of conversation and represented an opportunity to see into other people's lives. She was unable to take part in excursions into the woods or walk along city streets like those more physically fortunate than herself...”31 Schjerfbeck’s relationship with The Magic Mountain stands out. As a story saturated in illness narratives, Sarajas-Korte (1992:28) maintains that “she felt as if Mann had described her own life in this novel.” She supports this with Schjerfbeck’s following reflections: “‘the mountain’ is a life of freedom through illness... my life would be the poorer, without the sorrow, I would never have gained what I did - I would only have known the mundane.” Importantly, these thoughts bare striking resemblance to Mann’s (1999:726) own reflexive commentary on Hans Castorp, the protagonist of the tale: “what he comes to understand is that one must go through the deep experience of sickness and death to arrive at a higher sanity and health.” 32 In this way, through the lens provided by Mann’s novel, Schjerfbeck reflects on pain and sorrow as a positive, transformative process. Crucial here is Mattingly’s (1998:16) theory that “the fictional seems to be very useful for getting at what really matters,” and that “locating ourselves within an intelligible story is essential to our sense that life is meaningful,” (1994:812). Mirroring Schjerfbeck’s liminality, Hans Castorp (identification with a male subject again) finds himself symbolically expelled from his ‘normal’ life in the ‘flatlands’ after a visit to his tubercular cousin Joachim at a mountain-top sanatorium reveals his own illhealth. Through extensive dialogue, The Magic Mountain provides fruitful philosophies of illness. To take an example, the Cartesian separation of body and mind is revealed though the Italian artisan Settembrini’s dialogue: “the tragedy, begins where nature has been cruel enough to split the personality, to shatter its harmony by imprisoning a noble and ardent spirit within a body not fit for the stresses of life,” (Mann 1999:97). Here, the idea of an ill body as a cage/prison again arises. Castorp's departure from the sanatorium is repeatedly delayed (extending his sentence) as Mann accelerates the reader’s experience of time. Thus, he probes the contemporary philosophical and scientific debates in which time and space are inseparable. Time is halted in this introspective world as the diseased bodies of the sufferers have prohibited them from leaving and therefore stopped them from moving through space.

In this way, ill-health’s ‘prison’ is given literal walls.

Furthermore, The Magic Mountain recreates the atmospheric ‘medical culture’ of middle Europe’s sanatoria which Schjerfbeck herself appears to have subscribed to. Sanatoria (particularly those specialising in tuberculosis) became widespread in Europe from the late 19th century; justifiable in their promise of recuperation through a regime of rest, fresh air and good nutrition. In this way, sufferers entered into an institutionalised ‘sick role’33 whereby their experience of illness was regimented and structured. Indeed, as Mattingly & Garro (2000:24) argue, in cases of chronic illness, such as Schjerfbeck’s, treatment settings and health care institutions form an important part of the social world and narrative. In addition, terminologies such as “lame”, “sunken ones” and “shadows” used throughout the 31 Interestingly, the way in which these two sentences are juxtaposed influences the viewers understanding of Schjerfbeck’s infirmity by relating her love of literature to her ill-health in two ways. Firstly, she was able to walk with literary characters into the woods, able to experience such physicality through her imagination.

Secondly, her readings “provided her with topics of conversation,” giving her a level playing field on which to converse with her able-bodied correspondences (whose bodies provided them with more opportunity for activities about which to converse).

32 The author’s note The Making of the Magic Mountain first appeared in the Atlantic, January 1953.

33 A term coined by Talcott Parsons in 1951 denoting the new set of social roles associated with a sufferer’s illness. Classic examples include a change in food and drink, resting frequently, ‘taking time’ for recovery and obeying the rules of a doctor figure.

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novel indicate the detrimental, paranoiac attitude towards tuberculosis at that time. I suggest the focus on this particular disease is crucial to Schjerfbeck’s recognition of her Self in the novel. Tuberculosis played a key role in Schjerfbeck’s social life in that it was the demise of her father and her engagement. This is reflected in the early demise of Hans Castorp’s father and the difficulties between Hans Castorp and his Russian love interest Madame Chauchat (both of whom suffer from some variant of the disease). Towards the end of the 1890s Schjerfbeck herself received support from the Norwegian doctor Kristian F. Aandvord at a mountain sanatorium in Gausdal. She spent numerous summers on these mountains, and, as many art historians have suggested, Aandvord helped her rediscover her self-confidence, health and happiness. It is interesting to note, Sinisalo’s (1992:12) articulation of these curative periods in which she equates illness with gloomy obscurity, threatening in its anonymity: “once again the convalescent, Schjerfbeck strained out of the darkness and into the light.”

While ultimately we are alone in our experience of pain, I advocate artist practice as a fundamental form of communication between Self and social world, an aesthetic experience beyond that provided by narrative. In this way, I believe Schjerfbeck’s sensitive, highly considered, endlessly scraped and layered paintings prove therapeutic mirrors for fellow sufferers such as myself. Just as Schjerfbeck found a part of her ill Self in The Magic Mountain, her paintings now provide eternal opportunities for parallel therapeutic reflexivities; beautiful windows into the pain(t)ed world of another.

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CONCLUSION Today, medical technologies such as microscopy, bacteriology and radiology have visualised the interior structures of the body and thus fundamentally changed perceptions towards it.

Yet, this imagery does little to express any individual visualisation or emotional knowledge of experienced pain. Indeed, it is the artist who reveals a far more illuminating picture of the realities and fantasies of human experience; delighting in the process of imaginative creation.

Therefore, in conjunction with a diverse selection of images and theories, it has been the purpose of this text to progressively explore the pain of Helene Schjerfbeck in order to encourage further research in the visualisation of pain and illness while reigniting interest in Schjerfbeck herself.

From the interpretative ideas contained within this text I can conclude that the narratives of art historians have classified Schjerfbeck within a paradigm of illness through an emphasis on her early accident, her reclusive later life, her intersubjective presentations of pain in ‘hidden’ self-portraits and her powerlessness as a woman in her society. In this way, she has been assigned an archetypal personhood as a reclusive maiden haunted by illness. I can conclude that this affects interpretations of her art in numerous ways; her paintings are seen as symbols of both overt and oppressed pain, images of strength and weakness. Images of inanimate objects, the male sex, children and other species can all be interpreted as reflections of her Self because her art is seen as a ‘healing process’. Moreover, I suggest that Schjerfbeck would not have been as successful had an illness ‘myth’ not surrounded her. Indeed, I suggest Schjerfbeck herself knew the importance of achieving and painting beautiful objects in the face of adversity. I can also conclude that Schjerfbeck engineered her gender with great subtlety to appear strong in the face of illness yet allude to the weaknesses behind her ‘mask’. In this way, I conclude that her gender is imperative to understanding her illness identity. In relation to the questions “Why does Schjerfbeck remain on the peripheries of the Eurocentric art historical canon?” and “Is her illness to blame for this sidelining?” I would suggest that had her illness been conveyed with more visual conviction, Schjerfbeck may well have enjoyed greater attention. I suggest that while art historical narratives are saturated with her illness, this narrative envelopment is not enough to override the ambiguities surrounding her indistinct visualisation of pain.

Schjerfbeck is thus liminal, on the peripheries of ‘illness art’.

Yet, ultimately, the questions asked throughout this text must remain open for further interpretation. Illness, loneliness, pain and suffering, as universal human experiences (whether physical or emotional), are typically complicated to observe, beautiful in their awkward familiarity. The anthropologist must make her own distortion; as Mattingly & Garro (2000:29) articulate “in presenting the stories of others, anthropologists play a critical role in selecting, juxtaposing, and summarising material.” The interpretive strands I have woven together in this text offer abundant yet incomplete interpretive possibilities, and so it should be, as Schjerfbeck herself said: “how much there is in the imperfect, and why is the perfect form so empty?”34 Thus, I believe that Schjerfbeck would have appreciated such a fragmentary account of her experiences as viable and enlightening...

34

As quoted in Holger. 1992, 60. From a letter to Helena Westermarck, 3rd March 1907.

24

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APPENDIX Ahtola-Moorhouse (1992:65):

“...her interest in her own features was then remote from the sweet self-admiration of a Narcissus; the brush was wielded by an artist who identified herself more closely with Medusa, who knew how to shock, how to present death.”

Ahtola-Moorhouse (2002:37):

“The successive self-portraits also more openly reveal the aggressions, traumas and fears beneath the surface.”

Ahtola-Moorhouse (2007:21):

“The early childhood of Helena (Helene) Sofia Schjerfbeck was overshadowed by a number of tragic events... Throughout her life she had a limp and suffered from physical and psychological trauma.”

Ahtola-Moorhouse, L., Edam, C. & Schreiber, B. (1986:234): “...her long but difficult life, beset by illness... her series of self-portraits, from 1885 to 1945, is a unique pictorial record of an artist who with fierce defiance studied her own fragility...”

Arell (1992:100):

“...working on [reinterpretations], she relived the time when they were made, recalling the agony of painting in her youth...”

Boulton Smith (1970:20):

“Due to her isolation, her influence on her contemporaries was negligible; it was only later that she was recognised as the most ‘modern’ Finnish artist of the day.”

Boulton Smith (1985:46):

“Schjerfbeck suffered poor health from her childhood onward and this was later to force her to an increasingly isolated existence...”

Görgen (2007:15&41):

“...despite her health constraints and domestic duties, the conscientious artist tried to organise her life so that she would have as much time and energy as possible to paint... she frequently doubted whether she had the stamina for this work...” “over the years Schjerfbeck has been portrayed as an artistic prodigy from an impoverished family of Swedish descent, as a physically handicapped woman plagued by ill-health throughout her life, as a self-sacrificing daughter who suffered from her mother’s lack of understanding for her vocation, and last but not least as an intellectual outsider."

Holger (1992:63):

“It had taken 25 years to develop her eloquent silence into the language of visual art. These were years of difficulty - physical, economic and mental... her aloneness was tremendous. It was thanks to this that she found the 30

courage to change, develop and give greater depth to her painting.”

Howard (2006:124):

“Schjerfbeck is best known for her colour-poetic portraits, images of single figures, usually seated women, laconically depicted in floating black against monochromatic grounds. They read, sew or rest, their pale faces and downcast or glazed eyes conveying an introspection that accords with the ethereal qualities of their bodies... for the disabled ‘outsiders’ BorisovMusatov and Schjerfbeck such inaction and contemplation had personal poignance...”

Kämäräinen (1991:119):

“...plagued by continuous poor health, she was forced to spend long periods on sick leave and in sanatoriums in Norway and Sweden... in 1901, largely for health reasons, Schjerfbeck and her mother moved to Hyvinkää...”

Konttinen (1992:38):

“Helene suffered from a childhood hip injury, and went out into the world very young, shy and inexperienced... despite such adversity...”

Sarajas-Korte (1992:32):

“Schjerfbeck’s craving for solitude arose not only from her physical infirmity, but also from her nervous condition... judging from her letters her few joys were overshadowed by perpetual pain and violent emotional outbursts... her solitude was a mixture of deep longing, an intolerable sense of helplessness and occasional elation, whenever she felt she was making progress: ‘painting is difficult, and it wears you out body and soul when it doesn't come out right - and yet it is my only joy in life.’ Life was ‘one long struggle’ for Schjerfbeck...”

Sariola (1992:83):

“the serenity of Helene Schjerfbeck’s still lifes reflects the isolation and solitude through which the artist found the essential...”

Schneede (2007:34):

“She gave no clues as to her lifelong handicap and the hardship and pain she suffered as a result...”

Sinisalo (1992:9-11):

“Schjerfbeck was crippled in early childhood, whereafter many of her life's misfortunes... were to result from her disability”

Varnedoe (1982:211):

“...ill health ultimately forced her into the life of a recluse, she was nonetheless an important exponent of Scandinavian internationalism...”

31

Fig.1: SelfPortrait, 1878

Fig.7: SelfPortrait with Black Background, 1915

Fig.12: SelfPortrait, 1935

Fig.19: SelfPortrait with Red Spot, 1944

Fig.2: SelfPortrait, c.1880

Fig.3: SelfPortrait, 1884/1885

Fig.8: Unfinished SelfPortrait (reverse of Factory Girls on the Way to Work), 1921/22

Fig.13: SelfPortrait with Palette, 1937

Fig.20: SelfPortrait with Palette II, 1937-45

Fig.14: SelfPortrait with Palette I, 1937

Fig.4: SelfPortrait, 1895

Fig.9: SelfPortrait, 1913-1926

Fig.10: Self-Portrait in Profile, c.1933

Fig.15: Self- Fig.16: SelfPortrait with Portrait with Black Mouth, Black Mouth, sketch 1939 1939

Fig.21: SelfPortrait en face I, 1945

Fig.26: SelfFig.25: Self-Portrait, En Portrait with gammal målarinna (An Closed Eyes, 1945 Old Painter), 1945

Fig.5: SelfPortrait, 1912

Fig.27: SelfPortrait, 1945

Fig.22: SelfPortrait.

Saltsjöbaden, 1944 or 1945

Fig.28: SelfPortrait in Black and Pink, 1945

Fig.6: Self-Portrait with Silver Background, study 1915

Fig.11: SelfPortrait with Dark Dress, 1934

Fig.17: SelfPortrait, 1942

Fig.18: SelfPortrait, 1944

Fig.23: SelfPortrait. ‘Light and Shadow’, 1945

Fig.24: SelfPortrait. Bust, 1945

Fig.29: SelfPortrait. Mask, 1945

Fig.30: Last Self-Portrait, 1945

Fig.11: Self-Portrait with Dark Dress, 1934

Fig.16: Self-Portrait with Black Mouth, Sketch, 1939

Fig.8: Unfinished Self-Portrait (reverse of Factory Girls on the Way to Work), 1921/22

Fig.31: Marianne von Werefkin, SelfPortrait in a Sailorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Blouse, 1893

Fig.1: Self-Portrait, 1878

Fig.30: Last SelfPortrait, 1945

Fig.19: Self-Portrait with Red Spot, 1944

Fig.32 (detail): Edvard Munch, SelfPortrait with Spanish Flu, 1919

Fig.32: Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait with Spanish Flu, 1919

Fig.33: Girl in Rocking Chair, 1910

Fig.29: Self-Portrait, Mask, 1945

Fig.25: Self-Portrait, En gammal m책larinna (An Old Painter), 1945

Fig.34: Helene Schjerfbeck painting in Tammisaari, 1918

Fig.20: Self-Portrait with Palette II, 1937-45

Fig.35: Vicktor Borisov-Musatov, Portrait of the artist with his sister, 1898

Fig.36: Yayoi Kusama, Self-Obliteration by Dots (detail), 1968

Fig.7: Self-Portrait with Black Background, 1915

Fig.37: Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column, 1944

Fig.38: Claude Cahun, SelfPortrait, c.1920

Fig.3: Self-Portrait, 1884/1885

Fig.6: Self-Portrait with Silver Background, study 1915

Fig.22: Self-Portrait. Saltsjรถbaden, 1944 or 1945

Fig.39: Wounded Soldier in the Snow, 1880

Fig.40: Del la Grace Volcano, Jax Revealed, London, 1991

Fig.41: Vasily Vereshchagin, Left Behind, 1871

Fig.42: Helene Schjerfbeck in her apartment in Tammisaari, working on the still life Pumpkins, 1937

Fig.43: Pumpkins, 1937

Fig.44: Still Life with Blackening Apples, 1944

Fig.45: The Convalescent, 1888

Fig.46:The Convalescent, early 1890s

Fig.47: The Convalescent, 1927

Fig.48: The Convalescent, 1945

Fig.49: John Bellany, Janus, 1982

Fig.9: Self-Portrait, 1913-1926

Fig.50: By the Window, 1883

Fig.51: Churchgoers, 1895-1900

Fig.52: N채r Kon Blef Sjuk (Ocks책 en Sommarsaga), c.1899

Fig.53: Hans Baldung Grien, The Three Ages of Man and Death, c.1541-4

Fig.54: The Sickbed, 1877-78

Fig.55: Johanne Kreb, A Young Girl (Anna Koefoed), 1896

Fig.56: Sorrow (Child of Heat, The Gipsy Woman), 1919

Fig.59: Nurse I (Kaija Lahtinen), 1943

Fig.57: Vincent Van Gogh, Sorrow, 1882

Fig.58: The Broken String (By the Rivers of Babylon...), 1890s

Fig.60: Finnish Nurse III (Ester R채ih채), 1943

Fig.61: The Death of Wilhelm von Schwerin, 1886

Fig.62: Funeral in Brittany, 1884

Fig.63: Nature Morte, c.1877