Siri Derkert | 1888 - 1973
Siri Derkert was born in 1888 and grew up in a family of seven children in Stockholm. Mother Valborg had been a seamstress, father Edvard was first a bookkeeper but worked his way up and became a businessman in the textile industry in Norrköping. Siri Derkert lives with her family in large apartments in Stockholm and often spends the summers in the Stockholm archipelago.
Preparations
Derkert decides early on to become an artist, and with the support of her family, at the age of sixteen, she begins preparatory studies at Caleb Althin's painting school. In 1911 she was accepted as King. Stockholm School of Art. The Academy of Arts finds it difficult to accommodate the new ideas in the field of art that spread across Europe and come to the students' attention in different ways. During her short period of study there, there are large differences of opinion between students and teachers regarding teaching and art. Boys and girls are taught in separate classes, and Siri Derkert coordinates a protest against the female students not being allowed to draw nude male models. Strong friendships are built with female colleagues such as Anna Petrus, Ninnan Santesson, Lisa Bergstrand, who will be important to them well into their lives. When she leaves the school in the summer of 1913, there are hardly any female students left there. Parisian avant-garde In November 1913, Siri Derkert comes to Paris and rents a grand studio in the middle of Montparnasse, financed by Anna Petrus. A rich artistic life takes place in these quarters in the period before the outbreak of war with a large number of artists from Russia and Europe. There are several private academies and Siri Derkert visits both the Académie Russe and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. She discovers Paris together with fellow academy students Ninnan Santesson and Lisa Bergstrand, who are studying with Antoine Bourdelle. The three see the city and its museums, sew their own clothes according to Parisian fashion, hang out in Nordic artist circles and like to organize parties. They also encounter a new painting at the Autumn Salon in 1913 and at other exhibitions. The young Finnish-Swedish artist Ivan Lönnberg takes them to Picasso's art dealer Wilhelm von Uhde, where they probably see the Spaniard's work that was not yet publicly exhibited. Siri Derkert's own work is tentative. She strives to find a painterly language and draws a lot. Few works have been preserved from this first Paris period, but the woodcut The Model belongs to it. After a trip with Santesson and Bergstrand to Algeria, followed by falling in love with Valle Rosenberg in the spring of 1914, she leaves Paris in June of the same year.
Algeria
Siri Derkert, Lisa Bergstrand and Ninnan Santesson receive an offer to borrow a villa in Algiers from a Swedish engineer, and decide to travel there in February 1914. The stay lasts five weeks, and has great significance for Derkert's artistic development. The trip involves a dizzying encounter with people, nature and a foreign culture. She soon transforms it into painting. The three friends set up a studio in the villa and hire models from the area. In the pictures from Algeria, figures and environment often blend together in rich shapes and color combinations. Some studies reproduce an exoticizing perception of the local population. Derkert lost a significant part of his large work from Algeria in a theft, but a number of watercolors and also oil paintings, probably produced in Paris, remain. Around the turn of the century, there is extensive travel from Europe to North Africa, with the aim of entering an unknown and exotic continent. Several artists also travel there, while the exotic motifs that Swedish artists choose at the time are usually recreated in their studios at home or in Paris. Photographs show how the three friends enjoy an unusual freedom of movement. Siri Derkert's Algerian sojourn is an early and significant example of Swedish female artists traveling to Africa.
Valle Rosenberg
After five weeks in Algeria, Siri Derkert returns to Paris in March 1914. There she meets Valle Rosenberg, an artist from Borgå in Finland who figures in the artistic circles of Montparnasse. Charismatic and with contacts in the Paris art scene, he tries to live on his painting in Paris. The artists fall deeply in love. Much later, Siri Derkert would say: "You didn't need to have heard rumors about what a highly talented painter he was - to become interested in V. R. He was the first person you met who took an interest in and even admired his female peers as professionals. The first man who did not in the discussion of art, literature, social issues came up with the eternal templates." In 1914, Derkert sits as a model for Rosenberg's Portrait of a Woman. In the summer of the same year, they spend a couple of happy weeks together in Harrogate in England. They paint and create masquerade costumes before going their separate ways to Stockholm at the outbreak of war. When the couple realizes around Christmas time that they are expecting a child, they leave Stockholm and travel in the spring of 1915 in southern Italy. Siri Derkert here paints her first Cubist studies, a suite of Italian landscapes. In July 1915, the son Carl Valdemar (Carlo) is born in Naples. Family and friends are kept in the dark about the event.
The intimate theater, Bertil Lybeck
A year after Carlos's birth, Derkert and Rosenberg's money has run out. They leave the son in an Italian family and travel to Stockholm with the intention of exhibiting paintings. However, Rosenberg, a Finnish citizen with a Russian passport, will not go further than Paris. An intensive letter correspondence follows. In Stockholm, Derkert reconnects with his family and female friends. Now the epic, cubist paintings that today are only known through photographs are probably being painted. In May 1917, Anna Petrus, Märta Kuylenstierna and Siri Derkert put on a dance performance at the Intima theater in Stockholm. To Svenska Dagbladet they say: "We want dance as a work of art, which you can enjoy, and just as we try to express something in painting or sculpture, we want to try to do it in dance." The critics pay particular attention to the costumes designed by Derkert with the help of Valle Rosenberg's sketches sent from Italy. However, with time, the couple's reunion feels increasingly impossible and distant. Rosenberg's life in Italy from the late autumn of 1917 and barely two years onwards is largely unknown to Derkert and posterity. During the summer of 1917, Derkert meets the artist Bertil Lybeck, whom she got to know in Paris. Their daughter Liv was born in April 1918 in Copenhagen, secretly from family and friends, and in March 1920 Liv's sister Sara was born in the same city. In watercolors and oil paintings from Denmark, the pictorial experiments continue, some of which seem to reflect the artist's vulnerable life situation.
Fashion
Siri Derkert's costumes for the Intima theater in 1917 are noticed by Birgitta Glantzberg, director of the fashion house Birgittaskolan in Stockholm. In the coming years, Derkert is hired to design several winter and summer collections for the fashion house, and she regularly travels to Paris on behalf of the fashion house. About thirty watercolor fashion drawings have been preserved and with time-conscious elegance they show her sense of color and proportions. Cuts and models are influenced by Valle Rosenberg's ideas described in letters and sketches. In 1921, Birgittaskolan goes bankrupt and Siri Derkert incurs financial losses. Rosenberg, who sometimes lives with his son Carlo in Italy, is destitute. In the fall of 1919, everyone with Russian citizenship is expelled from Italy and Valle, seriously ill with malaria and tuberculosis, is sent away in a chilled goods wagon. When he passes through Stockholm, he meets Derkert, who tells us much later: "When I meet him on arrival in Stockholm, he is in good spirits but ill. Just thinking about eating, resting, getting well. So he can start working again, with anything that can bring money. Sometime later, maybe he will be allowed to start painting again. He is very secretive about his time in Rome.” Valle Rosenberg continues home to Borgå in Finland, where he dies in a sanatorium in December 1919.
Denmark, 1920s
The ambition to exhibit the Cubist paintings was first realized in 1919 when they were shown at the Free Exhibition in Copenhagen and later that year also in Lund. In 1921, they were exhibited at the April exhibition at Liljevalch's art gallery in Stockholm, and despite a fine reception by the press, her cubist works only gained a real place on the Swedish art scene decades later. During the 1920s, the grim reality catches up with her. She finds it difficult to establish herself on the art scene and the relationship with Lybeck ends. However, they were married from 1921 to 1923 to give the daughters legitimacy. At the time, her three children were living in foster homes in Italy and Denmark respectively. However, Carlo and his two sisters are brought home in different batches, and Derkert is in practice alone as the breadwinner. During this period she works for the Birgitta School until its bankruptcy in 1921, she travels to Paris as the magazine Idun's fashion representative, publishes fashion drawings for articles in Bonnier's weekly newspaper and writes cartoons in Dagens Nyheter under the signature "Den blonda frun" which humorously exposes the vulnerable position of women in culture . She also learns miniature technique and shows miniature portraits at the Stockholm exhibition in 1930. She has no home of her own and she and the children live alternately with her sisters, with the children's grandparents and later in the winter in a summer house in the Stockholm archipelago.
The incredible reality
In 1931, Siri Derkert gets her first permanent home, when modern Valborg buys "Lillstugan" on Lidingö. Her late works are created here in the former baker's cottage and its garden. Derkert explores what she called "the incredible reality", everyday life and people in the immediate surroundings. The models are the own children, state children at a nearby farm, and playing children from the summer stays in Norra Roslagen. In her self-portraits, strong spatial and existential moods are often reproduced. In connection with the child portrait being shown at her first solo exhibition at the Swedish-French art gallery in Stockholm in 1932, a critic writes that she belongs to: "unconditionally the herald of ugliness in modern art". The big breakthrough didn't come until 1944 with the solo exhibition at the galleries Gösta Stenman and Stenman's daughter in Stockholm. Essentially the same child motif is reviewed in the daily press: "Siri Derkert's large exhibition pours like the hot lava from a volcano in full eruption through the two floors.[…] I wonder if the child in Swedish art has ever been painted with such a consuming heat of empathy.[ …] Painting that is expressionism in the true sense of the word.” Daughter Liv also develops a special artistry, and in November 1936 they travel together to Paris to study until April 1937. In May of the same year, Liv becomes ill with tuberculosis. She died in November 1938.
Fogelstad
The grief after her daughter Liv's death in 1938 weighed on Siri Derkert for several years. She follows courses at the Peace College and from the summer of 1943 she annually visits the Fogelstad women's civic school in Sörmland. Both schools offered classes in history and psychology. In addition, at Fogelstad you could also study political science and practical civic knowledge. The studies mean a creative release and give her back the spark and the zest for life. In a large number of drawings, the leading women at Fogelstad are portrayed, including Honorine Hermelin, Elisabeth Tamm, Elin Wägner and Emilia Fogelklou. They had all been involved in the early suffrage movement. Although they were often politically more liberal than Siri Derkert, the Fogelstad stays meant that she sees more clearly the connections that create women's vulnerability. The portraits are at the same time deeply private and political. The process that has now begun leads to the late, public works. Derkert also signs the Fogelstad choir, the course participants' joint singing sessions. There, the women merge into a body with a thousand bones in an image of the female collective. Siri Derkert is increasingly getting involved politically. She is connected to the left-wing socialist organization Clarté and from 1950 chairman of the Stockholm section of the Swedish Women's Left-Wing Association. In the article "Woman - means or end?" published in 1948 in the newspaper Ny Dag, Siri Derkert delivers a scathing critique of the reactionary values surrounding women's role in the home which she believed permeated the state investigation Report regarding family life and domestic work from the same year.
Art and politics
From the 1950s clear political comments can be found in Siri Derkert's work. As she herself becomes an increasingly public and media person, newspaper clippings with reports on environmental destruction and other current events begin to appear in the images. The new collages are connected to the Cubism of the youth, but with the difference that now the textual content itself takes on an increasingly larger part in the expression. Siri Derkert also executes several images in poster form, either as poster templates as in the painting Amnesty International or as lithographs where motifs and slogans interact.
The public space
Siri Derkert's first work for the public environment is the Kvinnopelaren, which was inaugurated in 1958 at the T-centralen in Stockholm. In carvings made in wet concrete, two of the pillar's sides show "Images from the battle of ideas". There are portraits of Fogelstad women and the authors Thomas Thorild, Jonas Love Almqvist and August Strindberg. On the two remaining pages, images from women's everyday life, children playing, conductors, brick carriers and rowing dams are reproduced. In 1959, Derkert wins a competition for an artistic design of a wall in the Anundsjöbygden's real school student dormitory in Bredbyn. A long-term work with sketches in collage form begins on the theme of the mustard tree and the birds of the sky. The finished work, which consists of 21 colored concrete slabs, is never placed at the school, but can be seen today in Skövde Kulturhus. Siri Derkert's Carvings in natural concrete at the Östermalmstorg subway station, due to its size and complexity, is one of the most innovative works in the public space of the post-war period. Here, the personal continues to intertwine with the political through 145 meter long compositions of figure drawings, portraits, lines of text and notes. The work's theme is peace and environmental issues, dance, music and rhythm. Notes from the Marseljässen and the Internationalen, as well as the work's location in one of Stockholm's most affluent neighborhoods, meant that at the opening in 1965 it sparked, and still sparks, debate. Siri Derkert also worked in textiles through a collaboration with Handarbetet's friends. The Great Tapestry What are the birds singing???? from 1965, is made for the session hall in Höganäs town hall.
The new avant-garde
Throughout her adult life, Siri Derkert participates in various ways in the media and political conversation. In the early 1960s, she enters another interesting sphere: the new avant-garde. Her cubism did not have any impact in the 1910s, but the "cubist" Siri Derkert is now being launched in a big way in connection with her retrospective at the Moderna Museet in 1960. The museum's then director Pontus Hultén, the critic Ulf Linde and not least the superintendent Carlo Derkert, her son, gather around the artist and highlights her work. In Derkert's lively contemporary artistry with roots in the Parisian avant-garde of the 1900s, one finds a good representative of the modernity and modernism the museum likes to associate with. At the first exhibition in the newly built Nordic pavilion at the Biennale in Venice in 1962, Siri Derkert, aged 74, was appointed to represent Sweden. Both early cubist paintings are shown here, but above all the large collages, originating in the sketch work for the public artistic presentation The Mustard Tree and the Birds of the Sky. Several of the collages are today destroyed. Here, fragments with angelic motifs, stars, birds are shown, in almost ethereal compositions where Derkert's environmental theme is combined with and reinforces an almost spiritual theme. Derkert's exhibition at the biennale met with great appreciation and brought her work back into the avant-garde, where it once appeared but was not given a place.
