Sigrid Hjertén

Sigrid Maria 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 thirty years before dying of complications from a lobotomy, after having been diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1932.

Biography Sigrid Hjertén, by Isaac Grünewald. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden Sigrid Hjertén was born the 27th of October 1885 in Sundsvall. Her mother, Maria Hjertén (born Rahm) died in May 1888, when Hjertén was two and half years old. Her father, Svante Hjertén, remarried and the family moved to Stockholm in November 1897. She studied at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm and graduated as a drawing teacher and textile artist. 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 after having seen her textile works at the Art Industry Exhibition (Konstindustriutställningen) in Stockholm.

1910s As Hjertén studied under Henri Matisse in Paris, she was impressed with the way he and Paul Cézanne dealt with colour. She developed a style of contrasting colour fields and simplified contours. 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.

During her time in Paris, Hjertén developed a closer relationship with Isaac Grünewald, and the couple lived together in the late spring of 1911.

Legacy Hjertén's total production amounted to slightly more than 500 paintings, together with sketches, water-colours and drawings. Hjertén had to fight the prejudices of her time throughout her career. Her paintings seem extremely personal for the era in which they were made, when 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.