Ninnan Santesson is one of the first Swedish female sculptors, known both for her monumental works and for her intimate portraits of friends.

 

Ninnan Santesson was born at Tjolöholm Manor, now Tjolöholm Castle, but grew up at the Mälby estate in Södermanland. When she was twelve years old, her father died. Her mother and the children then settled in Stockholm, where Ninnan Santesson received her first lessons in modeling from the sculptor Sigrid Blomberg, a friend of her mother. In 1911 she was admitted to the sculpture school at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, but she remained critical of academic teaching and continued her studies in Paris. There she attended the Free Russian Academy, drew life studies at the Académie Colarossi, and studied at the monumental sculptor Antoine Bourdelle’s school, La Grande Chaumière. Ninnan Santesson, Siri Derkert, Anna Petrus-Lyttkens, and Lisa Bergstrand formed a brave group of women who trusted in their own abilities: “Perhaps a special kind of female art may come […] It is a time of development for women artists,” Ninnan Santesson wrote to her mother from Paris.

 

A decisive moment in her artistic development was her one-and-a-half-month stay in Algiers, during which she created the magnificent portrait Mr. Iffa. Upon her return, she exhibited this portrait and other works at the Artists’ House in Stockholm, together with the Finnish painter Engelbert Bertel-Nordström. They married in 1917, and the following year their daughter Lena was born.

 

All of Ninnan Santesson’s monumental works were created before 1930, all of them connected to Gothenburg. Her mother had moved there and was distantly related to the influential brothers Hans and Henrik Hedlund. This may have led to Santesson’s first commission in the city: the decoration of Consul Forsberg’s Lorensberg Villa, consisting of four carved oak fireplace figures for the living room, 14 caryatids for the library, and a painted ceiling for the wine cellar. In 1916 she created a rough-hewn granite memorial stone to Erik Dahlberg, placed on the staircase between Erik Dahlbergsgatan and Aschebergsgatan. That same year she began work on a monument to Viktor Rydberg. Initiated by the student union, the wish was to have the monument inaugurated on the 25th anniversary of the poet’s death in 1920. Since Rydberg was associated with the founding of Gothenburg University College, it was intended that the monument be placed at Vasaplatsen near the college building. However, when the monument was finally unveiled ten years later, it was placed in a far less prominent location, in the hollow behind the then Regional Archives. Santesson titled the sculpture Genius on a High Pedestal, through which she meant to embody Viktor Rydberg’s “genius” in the kneeling youth. By letting his left arm reach upward toward heaven and the world of ideas, while his right arm with the sword pulled him down toward the earth and reality, she sought to illustrate the poet’s dual nature—his idealism versus his realism. The same lofty classical style was used in her relief The Tree of Knowledge for Västerhöjd High School in Skövde, also completed in 1930. With this, her classicist period came to an end.

 

Before that, Santesson managed to complete another major work: the decoration of Masthugg Church in Gothenburg. The church had already been completed in 1912, but the first altarpiece had been withdrawn by its painter, Ole Kruse, who felt that his work did not suit the existing baroque frame. In 1923, Ninnan Santesson’s new altarpiece was inaugurated: The Ascension in the central panel, and Christ in Gethsemane and The Crucifixion on the wings, with 70 cm high figures carved in oak and painted by her husband Engelbert Bertel-Nordström. As a result of the successful altarpiece—and the fact that the artist had been “surprisingly inexpensive”—a 2-meter-high Christ figure was also commissioned for a triumphal crucifix. The mourning Mary and John were placed on consoles on either side of the cross. The decoration of Masthugg Church has been regarded as Ninnan Santesson’s greatest work.

 

In 1933, a heavy blow struck Santesson. In an article in Konstrevy, Klas Fåhraeus claimed that her Rydberg Monument had been plagiarized from a figure in Nils Möllerberg’s sculpture group Dexippos. Deeply hurt, she withdrew from public life. At this point, her artistic work took a new direction. She reduced her scale and began working with softer materials such as clay, terracotta, and bronze. She turned inward, focusing on close circles of artist friends and family, and created intimate portraits of them—especially of her daughter Lena. One of her favorite models was Naima Wifstrand; another was Marianne Frestadius, who sat for 48 heads. Old friends gathered in Santesson’s studio: Berta Hansson drawing, Siri Derkert modeling, and Maj Bring—who, after losing her sight, posed as a model. Santesson’s full-figure sculpture of her belongs among her masterpieces, as does her portrait of Hanna Rydh (1962). These portraits were built up from small lumps of clay, modeled from the inside out. The rough surface breathes movement and pulsating life.

 

In the 1930s, after divorcing Bertel-Nordström, Ninnan Santesson lived for five years in London with Naima Wifstrand. In the 1940s, she became politically engaged. She took in refugees from Nazi Germany, among them Bertolt Brecht and his family. She also worked for the Norwegian resistance movement and spent two months in a Swedish prison for espionage. In 1951, she and Siri Derkert took part in a propaganda trip to the Soviet Union, arranged by the Swedish Women’s Left Association. Not until 1960 did she exhibit again, at Färg och Form in Stockholm, together with Ann Margret Dahlqvist-Ljungberg and Maja Braathen. Ulf Linde was lyrical: “Ninnan Santesson’s sculptures and drawings have an incredible vibrato in the surfaces of all their forms. […] The things she shows are sensitive in the best sense of the word. There is never any banality.” In this new, dissolved style, she modeled her final sculpture, Girl with Dog, which was erected in large format in Mälarhöjden after her death.

 

Ninnan Santesson died in Stockholm in 1969. Her ashes were scattered in a memorial grove.