Name: Exhibition Tour— Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck | Met Exhibitions
Uploaded: 2026-01-08T14:45:26.000Z
Duration: 13 min 52 s
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When you see these works, they have an emotional quality.

Adverbs of degree

There is such a remoteness and otherworldliness, a silence in these pictures.

You become part of a dialogue with these works that is really profound and it draws you in.

People see not so much themselves, they see states of being, states of sensibility that makes a very intimate relationship.

Helm Schafberg is one of the great outstanding painters of the late 19th and especially the 20th century, who probably a lot of people have not yet heard of, but who is a national icon.

A celebrated painter in Finland and in Sweden, Elena Scharfbeck is the prize of Finland.

She was born in 1862 in Helsinki and died in Stockholm in 1946.

From the time she was 11 years old, she was recognized as a prodigy.

Scharfbeck started as a naturalist and then progressed to her own brand of modernism.

She developed a style of painting all her own.

Seeing Silence, the Paintings of Helen Schafberg really is the first major show of Helen Schafberg in the United States.

This exhibition really introduces her to an American audience.

It's also a fascinating story of an artist's journey and it's a sensation to have these works here in New York at the Mataborld Museum.

We had in mind not to do a retrospective of Scharfbeck, but to condense the very finest masterpieces of her career into passages of her art which actually track her life story as well.

There's often a lot of mystery in her work.

She is paring down her subjects to the simplest objects.

Her technique is also idiosyncratic and extraordinary.

She has a limited palette, white, black, blue.

Her figures never stare at her as she paints them, nor does she stare at them.

The more spare they become, more and more enigmatic they become.

You get a clear understanding of her development and growth.

From the very first paintings until the very final, spectral, searing, late self portraits, Scharfbeck was on her own path.

She was a very quiet, remote, introspective woman.

And yet she had fierce determination against all odds to pursue her painting.

The exhibition begins with Scharfbek's first full scale paintings.

These are paintings that she made actually in Finland.

The subject is the death of a 16 year old count William Schwerin.

He died in what is known as the Finnish War between Sweden and Russia.

It's a very touching Very humane painting and so accomplished for an 18 year old.

It won a prize at the Finnish National Society Annual Exhibition and she then won a stipend from the government to travel to Paris.

She was conforming to an expectation to memorialize Finnish history, but it stands so far apart from her later work in Paris.

She was obviously responding to her teachers, but she's already working beautifully with light in terms of portraiture.

She is still individualizing her figure, but already here she's softening her strokes, she's adding color in areas that aren't necessarily descriptive but that are aesthetically pleasing to her.

And it has a lot of feeling, this painting, and it was painted in 1884 when she was 22.

That is a remarkable fact that she was already so proficient at such a young age.

She was already manipulating her language to, as she said, seek the truth.

Shafrak actually painted this in St. Ives, the picturesque coastal town in Cornwall, England.

It was shown publicly in Helsinki on its completion, and it was damned by the press because they were looking for traditional landscape painting.

If you look at the touches of color, she's reaching a level of abstraction already in 1883, presaging what is to come, of course, in later decades.

In 1902, Scherfbeck moved from Helsinki to a small railroad town, Hyvinka, where she joined her widowed mother, essentially to look after her, which enabled Scherfbeck to leave the distractions of Helsinki and paint full time.

She was there with her mother until her mother died in 1923.

To my mind, these figure paintings are among the most powerful and evocative of, as you said, a sensibility.

She's continuing to hone her style and to render her language more and more spare.

And I think they also keep a certain distance from you as a viewer.

You almost like, approach them while they are still immersed in their own spiritual sphere.

And I think that actually makes them also so accessible.

You're part of, I would say, an emotional bond and the reflection that you have on yourself with it.

These are not portraits, these are figure paintings.

And that she does from her very early years, actually, she used local sitters, but she was, of course, using her knowledge of art history and also applying her deep training in different techniques to create work that is quite connected with artistic developments both of the time as well as of the past.

This painting, the Les scholes, dates to 1920, when Scherfbeck was actually in a picturesque coastal village called Thomassari, the Sitter is Sigrid Nyberg, who was her landlady in her boarding house.

She typically recruited anyone from the community, wherever she was, to pose for her.

It's a striking painting in and of itself, but it's also a very telling example of her idiosyncratic style, developed at mid career, where she would add subtract paint layers from her canvas, using a palette knife and stylus to actually remove paint to the point where she was often actually exposing the weave of the canvas.

So this one is actually one of the most elaborate in regard to using different techniques.

It is a work that depicts a sitter, but actually depicts a modern woman.

And I think that that's also important to see that Helen Schafberg as an artist was development of the modern woman.

I think she wanted to paint a certain prototype of a woman.

There's a certain power, actually, I think, in her expression.

So the severity, or what we now see as a strong expression, that I think is very intentional and powerful for us, of course, a great and important acquisition.

And it is the very first painting of Helen Schafberg in an American collection.

In this gallery, we deviate from chronology rather, I've decided to put the landscapes and paintings that sort of speak to each other in terms of her actual aesthetic.

So we have some landscapes from Fiesole, the hill town outside Florence, a painting evocative of Renaissance pictures.

And then on this wall, we have only five still lifes in the exhibition.

She didn't paint still lifes to the extent that she did figure paintings.

But this gives you a microcosm of the evolution of her aesthetic over time.

Very beautifully brushed, very softly painted, very mainstream, I would say.

But here we are marching forward in time to 1930, where she's using a very dry pigment, which you'll see in several of these paintings.

She's outlining her pears with a very strongly delineated black line.

And here you have an entire passage of canvas that's been scraped down to the bone.

Here your eye really recognizes what she's doing with her paint.

And she's creating this very energetic, textured surface here, where the objects sort of lose clarity, lose geometry, lose form.

The painting is a sort of pulsating example of her use of bright color, which one rarely sees elsewhere in her work, in the growing abstraction of even a still life.

She's as far removed from Paul CEZANNE as you could be at this point.

And here, this is a further example of the dissolution of form, the absence of geometry.

And one is struck by this black apple, considered by some as metaphorical, given the fact it was painted in 1944, in the worst years of World War II.

The shadow is just as prominent as the apple itself.

It's a fascinating abstraction, as a simple still life image goes.

In 1915, Scherfbeck's dealer, Gosta Stenman, introduced a young forester called Einer Reuter.

He was 18 years younger, and I think the love was a deep emotional attachment.

Each had a great passion for art, and so they were intellectually and emotionally very much in tune with one another.

She wrote him hundreds and hundreds of letters in her lifetime.

At a certain moment in time, he married and she had a nervous breakdown.

She was devastated, so she clearly wished for more of him and she painted several portraits of him.

This one she amusingly titled the Sailor.

He was no sailor, but it was painted in this coastal town, Thomassari, where they actually spent two weeks together, painting one summer.