Dita Amory will introduce the Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946). Renowned throughout Finland, she is little-known in the US. The Metropolitan Museum is the first major US museum to present her work. The exhibition of paintings was designed to present passages in the life of the artist, tracing her remarkable career from her training in naturalism to her growing abstraction in later years. In addition to developing her own brand of modernism, Schjerfbeck grew increasingly preoccupied with her materials and their application on canvas. She began adding and subtracting layers of paint using a palette knife and stylus. Often, her scraping left open canvas weave, a visual trope that we see in much of her later work. Schjerfbeck’s career spanned nearly 70 years, and she never stopped painting right until her dying days.
