Utsikten från Katarinavägen (The view from Katarinavägen)

Signed Sigrid Hjertén verso.

Sigrid Hjertén, considered a major figure in Swedish modernism, worked as an artist for 30 years before prematurely dying of complications from a botched lobotomy for schizophrenia. Not only a truly remarkable painter, as a female artist Hjertén, throughout her career, often had to fight the prejudices of her time. Her paintings also seem extremely personal for the era in which they were made, when formal issues of colour and form were uppermost in artists’ minds. Her interest in humankind was often manifested in dramatic, even theatrical compositions, while her approach to colour was emotional as well as theoretical.

When studying under, none other than, Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954) in Paris she discovered, and was impressed by, the way Matisse and Paul Cezanne (1839 – 1906) dealt with colour. She subsequently developed a style of contrasting colour fields and simplified contours. Hjertén’s aesthetic intentions primarily concerned themselves with colour and she strove to find forms and colours that could convey her emotions. In that respect her work not only has close ties to the French painters, with their graceful play of lines, but is also related to the German Expressionists, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880 – 1938).

The influence of Matisse is perhaps mostly discernible in Hjertén’s oeuvre from the 1910s. During this decade, Hjertén painted several interiors and views from her home, first at Kornhamnstorg Square and later at Katarinavägen Street, in Stockholm. Hjertén and her family (husband Isaac and son Ivan) moved to Katarinavägen in the spring of 1914. At the same time they signed the lease for a large studio in the adjacent building. The windows of the studio offered a breathtaking view over the inlet and harbour below. On a daily basis Hjertén thus had a first row seat as she watched and observed the pulsating and vibrating aspects of everyday modernity being played out on the quayside below.

Beginning in the spring of 1914, in tandem with her psychologically charged interior scenes, she gazed down on the buzz of the streets below the studio. In moments of solitude, and perhaps introspection, she forgot about the charged dynamics of her family life and, instead, focused on the world on the other side of the window. Her colouristically vibrant, and seductive, depictions of the port form a powerful series of modernistic cityscapes. The dynamic in these paintings rests on her masterful use of colour, whilst also benefitting from the contradicting zig-zag-lines enhanced by the masts and chimneys.

In The view from Katarinavägen Hjertén captures the activity on the docks. One can almost hear the noise emanating from the freight trains and all the ships passing each other below the mighty crane with its powerful extended arm. Hjertén’s bold cropping of the composition and the sophisticated interplay of lines creates a timeless painting that feels modern to this very day. All captured in an intense palette which reminds the viewer of the splendour of oriental art.  

According to the exhibition catalogue from Moderna Museet in 1964, the painting was executed in 1914. The date (‘Sigrid Hjertén. Sign. 4 Okt. 1923’) verso thus most likely refer to when the signature was placed on the work and not when the piece was actually painted. A reasonable explanation for this is that the painting was signed when it was eventually sold (nearly a decade after completion), a not uncommon practice for artists.

Provenance
Elisabeth Thiel, Ektorp, Sweden.
The collection of Sven and Maudie Olerud, Sweden.
Bukowskis, Stockholm, Sale 624, Modern Art + Design, 16 June 2020, lot 416.
Private collection, Sweden.
CFHILL, Stockholm, Ten by Ten, 11 – 26 November 2021.
Firestorm Foundation (acquired from the above).

Exhibitions
Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sigrid Hjertén – En retrospektiv utställning av målningar, April – May 1964, no. 19.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation