Seeing Silence: The Paintings of
Helene Schjerfbeck
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
December 5, 2025 – April 5, 2026
Self-Portrait, 1912
Oil on canvas, 17 1/8 × 16 1/2 in. (43.5 × 42 cm)
Finnish National Gallery Collection,
Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki (A-2016-51)
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Yehia Eweis
Beloved in Nordic countries for her highly original style, Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946) is relatively unknown to the rest of the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck is the first major exhibition in the United States dedicated to the artist’s work. Featuring nearly 60 works on canvas—including generous loans from the Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum, other Finnish museums, and private collections in Finland and Sweden—the exhibition will be on view December 5, 2025, through April 5, 2026.
Born in Helsinki, Helene Schjerfbeck witnessed civil war and two World Wars as well as the burgeoning of Finland’s national identity following independence from Russian rule in 1917. Despite many personal hardships, Helene Schjerfbeck never wavered in her determination to pursue her passion, painting for most of her life in a remote Nordic country, far removed from Europe’s centers of cultural upheaval and renewal. She once said resolutely, “All that I desire to do is to paint… there is always something to conquer.”
“Seeing Silence highlights the work of an extraordinary artist who, though long celebrated in Norway and Sweden as the most outstanding female painter of her time, has not yet achieved well-deserved visibility on this side of the Atlantic,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “The exhibition invites audiences here to experience Helene Schjerfbeck’s mesmerizing works and distinctive vision for the first time at a major U.S. museum, showcasing the remarkable perspective and introspection of an artist wholly dedicated to her craft over the course of eight decades.”Dita Amory, Robert Lehman Curator in Charge of the Robert Lehman Collection at The Met, said, “Painting in remote Finland without recourse to broader culture and the exchange of contemporary ideas, Schjerfbeck created her own language every day at her easel by sheer force of will. Seeing Silence looks beyond art history’s cultural mainstream to one woman who overcame immense struggles to produce a powerful body of work, highlighting her rightful place in the story of modernism.”
Seeing Silence traces Schjerfbeck’s artistic development from her early years in Helsinki to the end of her life in Sweden, illuminating the artist’s evolving style from traditional subjects in a naturalist vein to a painterly language of spare, often densely worked imagery. Schjerfbeck sanded and scratched through layers of paint, sometimes exposing the rough weave of her canvases as she experimented with her materials. As a valuable voice among the many strands of modernism at play throughout the world in the early 20th century, Schjerfbeck expressed a unique visual language that deserves recognition in the codified narratives of art history.
The exhibition unfolds thematically, beginning with an exploration of Schjerfbeck’s early years. Recognized as a prodigy at a young age, she won several grants to study in Paris and from there she took excursions to Concarneau in Brittany and later St Ives in Cornwall. Many of her early figure studies were painted in the art schools of Paris, while her more sentimental genre subjects reflect her rural travels. Schooled among artists working in naturalism, she created figure painting and landscapes that followed in step. Within a few years, she was showing paintings at the Salon, Paris’s annual art exhibition, and testing the boundaries of conservative painting.
In the next section, several large-scale canvases commemorate Finnish heritage. After centuries of Swedish occupation, followed by Russian rule, Finland was affirming its cultural identity. A history painting won Schjerfbeck a grant to study in Paris. Later, her compelling allusion to the Jewish festival of Sukkot earned her entrée to the annual state-sponsored Salon in 1883.
In 1902, Helene Schjerfbeck moved to Hyvinkää, a small railroad town several hours north of Helsinki, to care for her aging mother. The isolation of a rural setting enabled her to paint without the disruptions of city life. In modest accommodations and without access to professional models, she painted some of her most affecting canvases, often single figures dressed in black with little color to interrupt their dark silhouettes. Her mother, despite having no interest in her daughter’s vocation, was co-opted to model on several occasions. By this point in her career, Helene Schjerfbeck had radically redefined her aesthetic language. Soft brushwork characterizes these quiet paintings. Whether sitting or standing, reading or sewing, her subjects fill the picture plane and avert their gaze. Often bathed in raking light, her figures appear lost in thought and lost in time. Helene Schjerfbeck investigates formal language—light, space, volume—not the soul of the sitter. She told her models to look away as she painted them, demanded their silence, and refused to show them the end result. Essential to her practice at the start of a painting, the models were dismissed when Schjerfbeck’s inventive powers took charge.
A subsequent section presents a sequence of portraits from the 1920s and 1930s. Helene Schjerfbeck rarely noted a sitter’s name in her titles, and it is very likely that she suppressed her sitters’ identities for the same reasons she eschewed mimetic portraiture: in the few instances when she strove to transfer a likeness to canvas, her efforts often frustrated her until she got it right. Many of her sitters sport modish dress, evidence of Schjerfbeck’s lifelong interest in French fashion. After reading a 1912 article in an art magazine, she fell for the paintings of El Greco (1541–1614). Though she had no access to the originals, she worked up rather stylized transcriptions of his Madonnas and other sacred subjects, a preoccupation that intensified during World War II.
In 1894, the Finnish Art Society sent Schjerfbeck to Vienna and Florence to copy works by the painters Holbein, Velázquez, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, and Giorgione. While in Italy, she painted several ethereal landscapes of Fiesole, perched on a hill above Florence. There, no doubt, she studied the beautiful yet degraded frescoes decorating the city’s churches.
Spanning 50 years of Schjerfbeck’s career, still-life paintings illustrate the artist’s shifting creative language. The Red Apples (1915), unique in her career for its glowing palette, demonstrates the artist’s distinctive technique of layering and removing paint to achieve complex structures. By the 1930s, the artist had reduced her still-life palette to more somber tones, exploiting her fruits to further her surface experiments. In her final still life, painted in 1944, blackening apples metaphorically reference the devastation of World War II and the chaos of upheaval.
Helene Schjerfbeck interrogated her likeness in 40 self-portraits across her lifetime. Her canvases trace the arc of her artistic development as they materialize her physical growth and decline. From youthful expressions in a naturalistic language to facial distortions that anticipate the haunting finale of this series, Schjerfbeck captures her self-image with increasing idiosyncrasy and self-confidence.
In Schjerfbeck’s final years, as war raged throughout Finland, her art dealer persuaded her to relocate to Sweden. From 1944 to her death in 1946, she resided in a hotel in Stockholm. There she painted 20 of her 40 self-portraits. Few other series in the history of modern art articulate mortality with such candor, as the artist used thin, glazed color to produce monochrome representations that are at once haunting and magnificent meditations on the effects of age and illness.
Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck is curated by Dita Amory, Robert Lehman Curator in Charge of the Robert Lehman Collection at The Met. Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff, director of the Ateneum Art Museum, is the consulting curator.
A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.
This exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with the Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum. The exhibition is made possible by Elsa A. Brule.
THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 964
1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028
