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Lot Essay
Schjerfbeck had spent the spring of 1892 in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, copying works by Diego Velázquez, Franz Hals and Gerhard Terborch. Although she made no copies of El Greco's work at this time, she must also have seen his works at the Hermitage, beginning a lifelong appreciation of his art. She first mentions El Greco in a letter to Helena Westermarck in 1912, exhorting her to go to Spain and see the work of the man who renders people so beautifully, but it was not until the late 1920s that she began to reinterpret his art in her own distinctive style. Schjerfbeck returned to El Greco's work in the early 1940s, a period when she found it difficult to find models and when she was receiving more and more commissions for reinterpretations of her own earlier motifs, as well as works by other masters. El Greco's Madonnas, with their air of serenity and understated beauty, would seem the perfect complement to the subtleties and sense of stylistic purification of Schjerfbeck's own work.
'The spirit of her El Greco renditions is pure Helene Schjerfbeck. The reinterpretations she painted of El Greco's self-portrait and his Madonnas stand amongst her finest accomplishments. Even her small-scale charcoal and oil painting of El Greco's Madonna bust [Ateneum 479]... is one of Schjerfbeck's most effective readaptions, and it is just as much Schjerfbeck as it is El Greco' (S. Sarajas-Korte, 'Towards Synthesis', exh. cat. Helene Schjerfbeck, Ateneum, Helsinki, 1992, p. 30).
The present work is one of three reinterpretations of El Greco's Pale Madonna which were produced in 1943 and 1944 (Ateneum 478 & 479, private collection and Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere, respectively). Although stylistically very similar to Ateneum 478 and executed in the same medium, the present work shares with the oil version in the Hildén Museum the bold white highlight at the top of the woman's head, a typical visual motif that recalls Mans' collar or The landlord as a young man of 1926 (Didrichsen Art Museum, Helsinki). An image of startling expressiveness and beauty, Spanjorska efter El Greco, Blek Madonna demonstrates Schjerfbeck's masterful simplification of form.
'The spirit of her El Greco renditions is pure Helene Schjerfbeck. The reinterpretations she painted of El Greco's self-portrait and his Madonnas stand amongst her finest accomplishments. Even her small-scale charcoal and oil painting of El Greco's Madonna bust [Ateneum 479]... is one of Schjerfbeck's most effective readaptions, and it is just as much Schjerfbeck as it is El Greco' (S. Sarajas-Korte, 'Towards Synthesis', exh. cat. Helene Schjerfbeck, Ateneum, Helsinki, 1992, p. 30).
The present work is one of three reinterpretations of El Greco's Pale Madonna which were produced in 1943 and 1944 (Ateneum 478 & 479, private collection and Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere, respectively). Although stylistically very similar to Ateneum 478 and executed in the same medium, the present work shares with the oil version in the Hildén Museum the bold white highlight at the top of the woman's head, a typical visual motif that recalls Mans' collar or The landlord as a young man of 1926 (Didrichsen Art Museum, Helsinki). An image of startling expressiveness and beauty, Spanjorska efter El Greco, Blek Madonna demonstrates Schjerfbeck's masterful simplification of form.