Modern Expressionist paintig Sigrid Hjertén

Sigrid Hjertén (27 October 1885 – 24 March 1948), was a Swedish modernist painter. Hjertén is considered a major figure in Swedish modernism. Periodically she was highly productive and participated in 106 exhibitions. She worked as an artist for 30 years before dying of complications from a botched lobotomy for schizophrenia.
Sigrid Hjertén was born in Sundsvall in 1885. She studied at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm and graduated as a drawing teacher. At a studio party in 1909, Hjertén met her future husband, twenty-year-old Isaac Grünewald, who had already studied one year with Henri Matisse in Paris. Grünewald convinced her that she would do herself more justice as a painter. Later that year she went to Matisse's art school as well.

As she studied under Henri Matisse in Paris, she was impressed by the way he and Paul Cézanne dealt with colour. This shows in her painting in contrasting colour fields and simplified contours, her way of achieving the greatest possible expressiveness. Her aesthetic intentions had primarily to do with colour, and in her later works from the 1930s she spoke of colours in terms such as cold yellow. Hjertén strove to find forms and colours that could convey her emotions. In that respect her work is more closely related to the German Expressionists, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, than to the French painters, with their graceful play of lines.

Ateljéinteriör (Studio interior) from 1916 shows how radical Hjertén was for her time. The painting describes the roles she played as artist, woman, and mother: different identities in different worlds. Hjertén sits on the sofa between two artists – her husband, Isaac Grünewald, and, perhaps, Einar Jolin – who talk to each other over her head. Her large blue eyes stare into the distance. In the foreground a woman dressed in black – a sophisticated alter ego – leans against a male figure who might be the artist Nils von Dardel. Her son Ivàn crawls out of the right-hand corner. In the background we glimpse one of Hjertén's paintings of the period, Zigenarkvinna (Gypsy woman). Studio Interior and Den röda rullgardinen (The red blind), from 1916, are daring paintings that have given rise in recent years to new interpretations based on contemporary gender studies and reveal information about the artist's private life.Wikipedia

Ateljéinteriör 1916