The magic of painting is in how an accumulation of color can encapsulate and elaborate upon lived experience. A tired observation, perhaps, but when such a moment hits full force it still comes across as something of a miracle. How can so much be embodied by (to quote Symbolist painter Maurice Denis) “a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order”? It seems so improbable, and so rare. This train of thought came to mind while traversing “Independent Visions: Helene Schjerfbeck and Her Contemporaries,” a pleasantly innocuous exhibition of four Finnish painters, all of whom are women. Pleasant and innocuous, that is, until one encounters Self-Portrait with Red Spot (1944) by Schjerfbeck (1862–1946). Has there been a meditation on the depredations of growing older quite as pitiless? You’d have to look to late Rembrandt or Bonnard to find a picture that confronts mortality with as much sobriety and candor. (Schjerfbeck painted it at age eighty-two.) Applying a hurried gray wash and a jab of pink—the “red” in the title—Schjerfbeck created an image of scarifying self-awareness. It likely took five minutes to put Self-Portrait with Red Spot into place, but, really, a lifetime went into its making.
Has there been a meditation on the depredations of growing older quite as pitiless?
The name “Schjerfbeck” might ring a bell for New Yorkers with some sense of cultural memory. She was the subject of a 1992 retrospective at The National Academy of Design, and the paintings—stylized,