Studio Interior
Hjertén herself, her husband Isaac Grünewald and a third figure in the studio in Stockholm, in strong, flat colours. Hjertén studied under Matisse in Paris and was one of the Swedish Expressionists.
The colour describes not reality but feeling – the room tilts and the surfaces clash.
Sigrid Hjertén painted Studio Interior in 1916, in the middle of the First World War. She had studied in Paris from 1909 to 1911 at the school run by Henri Matisse, together with several other young Scandinavian artists. There she met Isaac Grünewald, whom she married in 1911. Back in Stockholm they both became central figures in Swedish Expressionism. The painting belongs to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
The picture shows a studio in Stockholm with three figures. Hjertén has depicted herself and Grünewald, and a third person is in the room. The room is filled with furniture, textiles and objects. The figures are drawn with heavy outlines and simplified forms, and the faces are more signs than portraits. It is an image of the artist’s life, but also of a marriage between two artists.
The composition is dense and somewhat unstable. Floor, walls and furniture tilt, and the perspective is inconsistent. The room seems almost to tip towards the viewer. This creates a sense of unease and intensity, as if the room were charged with tension. Hjertén built up the picture with large areas of colour meeting at sharp boundaries.
The colours are strong and flat: red, blue, green, yellow and black. They do not follow reality but express a mood. Here the lessons of Matisse are clearly evident; he taught his pupils that colour should act in its own right and not merely describe objects. Hjertén painted in oil on canvas with visible, often rapid brushstrokes.
The picture has been interpreted as a comment on her own situation. As a woman and an artist she lived in the shadow of her more celebrated husband, and at the same time she was mother to their son Iván. Scholars have noted how in several studio pictures from these years she places herself in a way that shows both closeness to and distance from Grünewald. How much of this was intentional cannot be known for certain.
Hjertén’s painting met with harsh criticism in Sweden. Critics mocked the strong colours and simplified forms. Abroad she was more appreciated. In 1915 she exhibited with Grünewald and Einar Jolin at the Der Sturm gallery in Berlin, one of the most important galleries for modern art at the time.
In the 1930s Hjertén suffered from mental illness, and she spent her last years in hospital. She died in 1948. A large retrospective at Liljevalchs in 1936 had by then already demonstrated her importance. Today she is regarded as one of the most important Swedish modernists, and in recent years her work has attracted great attention both in Sweden and internationally. Studio Interior is one of the works most often singled out.