Sigrid Hjertén

Sigrid Hjertén, whose art initially met with considerable resistance from the critics, is nowadays regarded as one of the supreme representatives of the Swedish modernist avant-garde in the early 20th century, especially praised for her expressive use of colour. Born and raised in Sundsvall, in northern Sweden, she grew up in an economically well-to-do middle-class family. After her mother died of tuberculosis, when Sigrid was only two years old, her father remarried in 1897, after which the family moved to Stockholm.

In Stockholm, Hjertén studied art at the Advanced Commercial Arts School. Through her stepmother, Tora Östberg (1860 – 1908), she got to know Tora’s brother, the world-famous architect Ragnar Östberg (1866 – 1945), the man behind Stockholm's legendary City Hall (built between 1911 and 1923). Ragnar Östberg introduced Hjertén to an important group of architects, artists and writers and arranged a place for her at Giöbel’s textile company, where Hjertén created designs for woven tapestries. Her own works were exhibited at the important Commercial Arts Exhibition in Stockholm in the spring of 1909.

This was followed by a long-awaited stay in Paris, as a student at Henri Matisse’s academy, 1909 – 1911. Hjertén made lots of friends within the Scandinavian artist’s circle surrounding Matisse’s school, and it was here also that she met her husband, painter Isaac Grünewald (1889 – 1946). The couple married shortly after returning to Sweden, in the autumn of 1911, just before their son Iván (1911 – 1996) was born. The artistic couple had much in common: they were both expressionists and students of Matisse, and they both used similar colour-schemes, initially also often working on the same, or similar, themes.

Hjerténs stay in Paris gave her vital impulses. Görel Cavalli-Björkman writes:

Several of her significant paintings from 1915 - 1916 reflect what she had learned from Matisse. Just like her role-model, Sigrid Hjertén wanted the emotions that her themes aroused to be expressed in the totality of the painting, through the decorative and musical unity of colours, forms, and lines. She abandoned her use of shaded colouring to create compositions based on large coherent blocks of clean and shiny rainbow tones. Warm colours were contrasted against cool tones. Her disregard for central perspective was quite obvious and her use of varying angles of incidence give her images a certain tension.

The 1910s were a busy time for Hjertén artistically. Together with Isaac, and other so called “Matisse-students”, she exhibited her work in a series of exhibitions throughout Scandinavia. The group also exhibited at Herwarth Walden’s (1878 – 1941) pioneering modernist gallery Der Sturm in Berlin, which brought further international recognition. The German expressionists who exhibited at Der Sturm influenced Hjertén who began to experiment with new techniques including linocuts, woodcuts, etchings and lithography.

When the family lived in Paris, 1920 – 1932, her art changed. Despite numerous exhibitions in Sweden as well as internationally, she no longer belonged to any group or association in the way she had done during the 1910s. The 20s were marked by her artistic uniqueness, influenced by the French art and culture that surrounded her, which resulted in colouristic, but intimate paintings. Her immediate surroundings and portraits became regular subjects. Hjertén also took an interest in landscape painting during the family’s travels in the south of France and Italy. Some of her work from this period express her nervousness and restlessness – reminding the viewer of van Gogh’s landscapes. This nervousness would later prove catastrophic. Görel Cavalli-Björkman writes:

In early 1932 the Grünewald family left Paris. It was during this relocation that Sigrid Hjertén became mentally ill and on March 31 she was admitted to Konradsberg hospital where she received the diagnose of schizophrenia. After a year of artistic inaction, she was released from hospital and returned to her painting with a violent freneticism. Although the fundamental characteristics of her art remained unchanged it seemed as though the manifestation of the illness and its first phase led her to release all inhibitions. She was inspired by her earlier themes and used them to create new paintings.

In the autumn of 1936 Hjertén’s collected works were exhibited at Konstakademien (Royal Academy of Art) in Stockholm. At the same time she was admitted to Beckomberga hospital where she gave up painting altogether, and would remain until her death. The following year Isaac Grünewald filed for divorce to marry his student Märta Grundell (1908 – 1946). Sigrid Hjertén died in 1948, as a tragic result of a failed lobotomy.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation