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| Carl Fredrik Hill, The Tree and the River Bend, 1877. Photo: Åmells Konsthandel, Stockholm. |
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| Carl Fredrik Hill, The Lime Quarry, 1876. Photo: Bukowskis, Stockholm. |
It wasn’t over till the fat lady DJed and the two performers on the blazing raft on the Seine churned out the wicked kitsch that is “Imagine”, Lennon’s ode to world Communism. The vomitory inauguration of the Paris Olympics (with the insignificant athletes tucked away on dinky boats) was a baleful flaunt under the care of our new totalitarians and their little foot soldiers, the witless wokies. A certain novel from 1948 warned us about a time when ignorance would be cherished as strength – but carry on you fools.
When Sony ditched Lasse Hallström on the grounds that he couldn’t keep up with the lousy standards of today’s Hollywood, the Swedish director spawned a new project at home, involving his daughter and his wife as the transcendental painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944). Hilma (2022) has the looks of the artist’s day and age, but the film’s dishonest, dumb and lifeless sentiments are all cooked up in the usual woke pan of contemporary Feminism. Anyone who has encountered af Klint’s strange and vast paintings (and who has the capacity to think for a few seconds) knows that a cornerstone in her art is the beautiful erotic dualism between the male and the female. Consequently, you have to be an imbecile to put these words in her mouth, but these filmmakers do: “There is only one sex.”
Although the catalogue has its mandatory share of woke pan nonsense (this is Sweden after all), the marvellous yin-and-yang of XX and XY chromosomes rules at Sven-Harry’s Art Museum in Stockholm, where the reflective yet emotionally intense landscape painting of Fanny Churberg (1845–1892) and Carl Fredrik Hill (1849–1911) is on show – a face-to-face/head-on exercise that confers with the forests and spruces of Churberg’s Finland (a host of them are curiously painted in Düsseldorf) and the precious vision-lustred vistas of Hill, the Swedish giant with the lunatic in his head.
“I have wanted to do an exhibition with Carl Fredrik Hill for a long time, and one of the biggest reasons is that the founder of the museum, Sven-Harry Karlsson, had one of the largest private collections of Hill before he donated it. Carl Fredrik Hill is not only Sven-Harry’s favourite artist, but also that of many artists in the present day. Many people know about Hill’s period of illness, and there are many exhibitions around it. I myself was very curious to explore a little more about the ten years before he was sadly struck by schizophrenia. To help me out, I invited Pedro Westerdahl as a guest curator. At the same time, I felt that I wanted to highlight not only Hill but also a coeval female artist who was just as skilled,” explains Museum Director Dragana Kussoffsky Maksimović.
Though she had been on a museum tour around Finland together with Sven-Harry Karlsson a few years earlier, the XX share of the exhibition was an elated discovery for Kussoffsky Maksimović, as for most Swedes. “I couldn’t find a name here in Sweden, so I called Finland. Barbro Schauman [the other guest curator] replied in a flash: ‘It is Fanny Churberg.’ I didn’t know about her but started to google and saw this fantastic landscape painting, and I was completely taken by it. It was amazing that it held such power, even as online images.”
“And here they are, a year and a half later, side by side – Fanny Churberg and Carl Fredrik Hill – who also, as it turned out, were in Paris at the same time. There is no documentation that their paths were crossed. But Churberg had [the Swedish painter] Wilhelm von Gegerfelt as a teacher, who was Carl Fredrik Hill’s close friend and patron, so it is highly likely that they met. And now they are facing each other, more or less one hundred and fifty years later, here at Sven-Harry’s Art Museum.”
Towards a New Landscape is indeed a relevant exhibition in this vexingly layouted art museum – this time with the room at the top as the best option, where the two artists’ influences are made known (including a painting by Corot) and where Hill’s and Churberg’s pieces work quite well together unlike the combos in the less tiny galleries.
Fanny Churberg’s adventure began on a steamboat to the country’s new white capital Helsinki in the early autumn of 1865. She was only twelve when her mother died, and for this reason she had to grow up all too fast since there were six younger siblings who needed her parenting and her services at home in Vaasa. Now she was nineteen years old and free for the first time, her beloved father had recently passed away after a long period of failing health. The young woman couldn’t sleep that final night on the steamboat, life was just too beautiful and full of hope – the sea was smooth, the stars waltzed for her in the dark and she was wealthy enough to do whatever she desired with her future.
In her first letter from Helsinki (dated September 29) Churberg wrote, “Perhaps too bold to think of the spruce tree – the image of fidelity – but the spruce is a Finn and so am I.” A few weeks later she described a walk in a park with some friends: “I enjoyed the fresh breeze and the wild nature indescribably – an autumn landscape lit by the October sun is very lovely – everything looks fresh and mighty bold, the air is so clean and invigorating, and the bare trees bear witness to struggle and battle. Here it was mostly conifers, hills and valleys, lake and rock walls. My company thought it was not enough of order, I enjoyed the disorder – had longed to get out into God’s free nature.” This was how Churberg looked at things and experienced them, and these were the particulars that she would mirror in her landscape painting.
Her younger colleague Helene Schjerfbeck wrote many years later in her diary: “That which lies innermost – passion – that I would like to reveal, but then one is ashamed of oneself and cannot conjure it up – because one is a woman. Women have seldom become such conjurers. Fanny Churberg did.”
Once Churberg had come to the conclusion that it was an artist that she wanted to be, she confided to a friend that “now I have decided to paint like a woman never has”. She spent the happiest years of her life in Düsseldorf in the winters – in the late 1860s, with a long break during the Franco–Prussian War (more of the forced old dread and sacrifice for the “privileged” sex), and then throughout the first part of the 1870s – where she was privately tutored by male painters who supported her in every way possible (yet the catalogue runs its dull male-oppression narrative about how the “limitations and obligations being a female artist entailed”).
“The Düsseldorf School” was a mixed bag of showy, jocular genre painting, while imaginative assessments were kept in low regard, with the flipside that it made the general public discover art in a different way. Though there are elements of the picturesque and the decorative in her less interesting works, Churberg was for the most part herself and painted in raw opposition to the run-of-the-mill idealism of the day, using (comparatively) brave colours and brushstrokes which render her paintings a kind of artificiality that is felt but also wordless. Guest curator Barbro Schauman points out that Churberg “never sought the beautiful and arranged, it is a slash-and-burn that has come to the fore in these paintings”.
“For Fanny Churberg nature was a battlefield for the never-ending struggle of powerful emotions and atmospheres. Nature was something altogether too great for man to have any part in it,” tells the guidebook to Finland’s National Gallery, Ateneum. “Churberg’s contemporaries found it difficult to embrace the fervour of her art. Her paintings seemed too strange, the colours loud and garish, the harshness of the landscapes frightening to idealistic tastes natured by [Finnish writer Zacharias] Topelius’s spirit of idyllic nature worship. Churberg’s trees spoke of struggle against the wind and storm, the solidity of her stones seemed crushing and hostile. Churberg’s season was dark late autumn rather than bright snowy winter. Her favourite time of day was sunset, dusk, moonlit night rather than the light of days.”
The piece of land that is Finland had been part of the kingdom of Sweden for some four hundred and fifty years when it became a grand duchy under Tsar Alexander I in 1809. The 1800s were a time with a new sense of nationhood, not just in Finland but in many countries. The greatest emblem of Fennomania was a work of poetic folklore that had been compiled for decades by Elias Lönnrot into the national epic the Kalevala (a definite version came out in 1849), published in Finnish and not Swedish that was the official language and the language spoken by the educated classes in Finland.
“Romantic nationalism began to affect the visual arts at about the same time as it has literature. But the particular problem, as far as painting and sculpture were concerned, was to establish a fine art tradition of technical proficiency with which to express it. Peasant handicrafts might continue to flourish, but fine art had only existed at a modestly provincial level,” writes John Boulton Smith in The Golden Age of Finnish Art: Art Nouveau and the National Spirit. “Up to the 1880s the subjects chosen were often empathically Finnish, but the pictures look merely typically 19th century as the artists struggled, with increasing success, to master the various degrees of international romanticised Realism.”
The highly religious Churberg was a passionate spokeswoman for Finnishness. One hundred years before Kraftwerk made Düsseldorf great again, the city and its distantness from the land of the 168,000 lakes and the deep spruce forests only emphasised Fanny Churberg’s national attachment, which is more than evident in her Düsseldorf paintings. In a letter she tells a friend that she is working on a picture of an imminent thunderstorm, “and as I paint it, I have such a warm summer feeling, as if I were sitting there and could hear the whispering of the birches, smell the flowering fragrance of the rye, and the air would be so very, very light – and my heart too”. In her mind and in her art, she was always back in Finland.
Barbro Schauman says that Churberg’s time in Paris – October 1875 to April 1876 – was decisive for the remaining years that she dedicated to painting. “She visited museums, galleries, she painted for von Gegerfelt and she sent her paintings home for exhibitions. And above all, she was inspired by [the great name of the time, Charles-Françios] Daubigny and Corot. She was very much influenced by these two, and after Paris came her moonlit landscapes, atmospheric landscapes, evening blushes and nature scenes that cannot be imagined without this time in Paris. Düsseldorf was her schooling, where she learnt to paint technically, but the soul of her landscapes came after Paris, in 1876, for barely four years. Her production was also very small: about two hundred and fifty oil paintings, which is not much for an artist.”
Churberg painted seven still lifes in Paris. Three of these are displayed at Sven-Harry’s but the impression they leave is baroque and backwards. The parks in Paris could not possibly reflect the wild nature of her temper – three landscape paintings were however made during a fortnight in the Forêt Dominale de Meudon before she left France, only to return to Paris one last time for the Exposition Universelle in 1879.
Two things piqued Churberg’s curiosity in the mid-1870s during her six-month stay in Paris. The first one was the Barbizon School of artists who suffused their paintings with an atmospheric glean that really never grows old. Churberg brought this approach back to Finland and originated the finest paintings of her life – as Markku Valkonen puts it in Finnish Art Over the Centuries, “Her work during that brief period was uneven but astounding. Churberg painted boldly simplified pieces that at later age would have been called Expressionist. It seems as if Impressionism liberated Churberg from her Romantic outlook by giving her the right to use independent brushstrokes and colour.”
In his book about East European Art 1650–1950, Jeremy Howard discusses how these last astounding years of painting were “marked by a radical departure from convention. In particular she challenged social codes concerning the ‘feminine’. Deeply affected by the pleinairisme she had witnessed in France, Churberg’s landscapes became images of the alien force of nature. Using increasingly free, broad and violent brushstrokes, she expressed the human relationship with this force as a strongly emotional yet ultimately insignificant struggle. Preferring wild and bleak northern scenes, the dark seasons of autumn and winter, the dark forests in summer, and dusk, hers was a nature forbidding to man and yet whose drama touched a chord with her passionate temperament.”
During the winter of 1880, Churberg stopped painting altogether, she also destroyed some of her recent works. Receiving the Finnish Art Society’s Ducat Prize the previous year was just way too late for this resolute artist who only gained the smallest acknowledgement in her motherland during her short lifespan, until she was rediscovered in 1919 by the country’s leading art dealer Gösta Stenman. The other thing that Churberg brough with her from Paris was a newfound preference for the decorative arts. In 1879 she and architect Jac Ahrenberg founded the Friends of Finnish Handicrafts with the purpose “to promote handicrafts in Finland and their patriotic and artistic refinement”.
“In all fields of culture the voice of international liberalism was at loggerheads with the views of national Fennomania,” argue Merja Manninen and Päivi Setälä in The Lady with the Bow: The Story of Finnish Women. “As a Fennoman, Churberg set as her goal the development of a ‘Finnish style’. The Friends of Finnish Handicrafts circulated new ideas and models for handiwork based on folk art. Fanny Churberg also wrote about these ideas in the press. The society’s greatest achievements were in participation in the Art and Industry Exhibition in Copenhagen in 1888 and the Paris World Exhibition in 1889. The textiles for the Paris exhibition were to be Fanny Churberg’s last major work for the society.”
Before the (imaginary) band that Carl Fredrik Hill was in started playing different tunes, he produced two hundred landscape paintings that are as profound, refined, raw, elegiac and stunning as Talk Talk’s last two albums, Spirit of Eden (1988) and Laughing Stock (1991).
Guest curator Pedro Westerdahl talks about how Hill “explored the possibilities of painting in a way that is unrivalled in Swedish art history. He went to great lengths to create a style of painting that foreshadowed Symbolism ten years later. He unravelled these artistic knots in a couple of years, which is why we must also highlight his healthy period, it is extremely exciting. In Churberg’s work there are often figures, but not in Hill’s. Hill wanted the viewer to populate his landscapes. Hill’s landscapes are actually camouflaged self-portraits, he expresses his own pain in these paintings. There is a lot of emotional content in his painting during this period and I think it is so incredibly transformative for its time.”
Carl Fredrik Hill was in truth two dissimilar artists, with two dissimilar non-careers. During the second term as the homebound madman-genius – when his mother and sister and the housemaid in the family home at Skomakaregatan in Lund (behind the City Art Gallery) in southern Sweden provided him with four sheets of paper each day to draw on – Hill wrote in his scattered 248-page-long manuscript: “I sing how a picture becomes deep and true / Of how vividly it reveals nature / And how a picture in its own greatness burns / And how a picture in its own true feeling smiles.”
Hill’s old father was an erratic nutter who set the ground for Carl Fredrik’s ill health and further did what was in his power to put a lid on his son’s artistic dreams. Lars Gårding describes in Mathematics and Mathematicians: Mathematics in Sweden Before 1950 how Hill Sr was “the source of the anecdote about the learned professor who built himself a house without a staircase to the second floor and a fireplace without a flue. But it was the memory of Hill’s curious notations that survived longest in the mythology of Lund professors.” The mathematical father’s eccentricity included ploys such as his suggestion to make the mustard seed a unit of measure and his thesis on “The Average Distance of Fields to the Home”.
Carl Fredrik Hill’s way towards a landscape painting that burns and smiles as if the certitude of the universe is speaking to us began at the provincial Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in the fall of 1871, when he was twenty-two years old. Lars Ragnar Forsberg remarks in his book on the country’s famous banker and major art collector, Ernest Thiel, that the Swedish art students’ flight to Paris “almost had the character of exile. The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where many of them had been pupils, was a stuffy and disadvantageous institution. The young painters’ criticism was not gracious. Carl Fredrik Hill felt that none of the teachers could either paint or teach.”
Before he abandoned his Stockholm situation, Hill wrote to his parents – who he had to curry favour from to receive the monetary aid that he was completely dependent on – stating that “wait till I get to Paris and learn to paint, and then I shall earn money, and it will be my pleasure to show the old school here how rotten were the idols they have kneeled down for and worshipped”. Hill came to Paris on November 7, 1873 with the objective “to arrive at the true harmony between the inner and outer, between the spiritual and the sensuous, between feeling and understanding”.
The great Corot was the artist in France who overwhelmed the young Swede for “Corot has discovered a new world, because he has discovered a new way of seeing the old.” The ethereal quality of the French artist’s works was what especially persevered with Hill. The summer of 1874 was spent in Barbizon (south of Paris) accompanied by the German painter Max Liebermann (and two Hungarian colleagues, László Paál and Mihály Munkácsy). Half a decade later Liebermann told Swedish art historian Adolf Anderberg that “there was something of the visionary about my friend Hill, something which set him in a class by himself”.
In 1874, a roof window in Hill’s studio home in Paris fell over his face and scarred him both on the outside and the inside. The artist remarked that “I would rather lose my nose than my genius, because you very often spot beautiful noses but very rarely great geniuses.” It is not sure whether Hill’s call-me-genius disposition stemmed from an actual understanding of his true potency as a God-given artist, or if most of this derived from poor self-esteem – however, these are the kinds of things that he boasted in his letters: “My friends have proclaimed that I am a genius, which I have always been convinced of myself, but I don’t know how it will end if I fail in all the great things that I intend to do. I’ll be the laughingstock of my enviers at home.”
Carl Fredrik Hill completed a work in 1875 that he had initiated in Stockholm and that he had erased and repainted fifty times, and it is a moonshine landscape that is in the Sven-Harry’s show. That year was the sole occasion when the Paris Salon accepted a painting from Hill. In 1876 he penned that, “I have now arrived at the conviction that the one thing to seek in art is the true, le vrai. But not the banal naturalistic, but rather the heart of truth.” When he for the last time was rejected in 1877, Hill thundered: “Any old spice dealer can learn to paint a picture that will be accepted; and believe me, having painted as long as I have, it would be the easiest thing in the world to get two works in, if I were to betray my originality and my conscience as an artist.”
In the spring and summer of 1877, Hill was chasing after his ends in a roaming mode around the Seine, in the rural areas south of Paris and always with the river close by. His most famous and to the format largest painting, The Tree and the River Bend, has a given place at Sven-Harry’s Art Museum but was bafflingly turned down by the Salon. This is a masterpiece that shines of carefree solitude and a sudden respite from life’s ailments. The cat who walked by himself wrote to his family in Lund: “I feel like a pearl in gold.”
The catalogue is edited with a bit of the ordinary inconsistency, and the foreword regurgitates the common inculcated affectations of the climate emergency – “We are in the midst of a critical event in the Earth’s 4.5-billion-year-long history. Climate disasters come one after the other” – while one of the essays informs us about France’s “unusually intense summer heat” of 1877 that made Hill relocate to a seaside town in Normandy for a month, where he painted a new marine every happy day: “There is no more similarity between what I used to do and what I do now than between night and day. As heavy, dark and gloomy as my works were before, they are as light, bright and airy now. The asphalt is totally banned.”
The “asphalt” returned all too soon, though. Back in Paris, Hill painted a few masterworks in Parisian blue and cadmium yellow that foreshadowed his fast-approaching schizophrenia. Hill was twenty-eight years old when he completely lost his mind and his screams and frenzies became insufferable for the neighbours. (When some friends visited Hill a few weeks earlier that winter and asked him to close the window to his freezing studio, he told them to shut the hell up, he was already someplace else and he was sweltering.) On January 19, 1878, Wilhelm von Gegerfelt and another Swedish artist arrived by horse and carriage to take Hill, as they asserted, to an art exhibition. The two men jumped out of the carriage just before it passed the gates to Dr Blanche’s Maison de Santé in Paris, with a crying Hill inside.
Hill’s famous painting of a hearse with the red glowing dot that is pushing through a despairing landscape is in the Sven-Harry’s exhibition and it was executed at the Passy mental asylum as a remembrance of the kidnapping – an abduction that was absolutely necessary given Hill’s severe schizophrenia and prosecution delusion. (His abductors did something indefensible however when they obliterated all the paintings in his studio that they found too wacky and offensive.) Hill had noted in December 1877 that “One hour’s painting madness is so glorious that one would gladly give up a whole ordinary life for it.” A month later he was insane for life.
In June 1880, Hill’s two sisters Hedda and Marie-Louise travelled to Paris to move him back to Sweden. He spent a few years in an asylum in Lund, and the remaining decades of his life in his native home where thousands of drawings were made, depicting the fantastic journeys Hill savoured in his head. The only ones who saw these works other than his family were unknowing people who were just passing by on the street when he used to exhibit his drawings in the garden on Sundays.
In Hill’s Lund manuscript is written: “Madness – how sublime when you wholly shut out the world.”
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| Fanny Churberg, Mountain Landscape, Savolax, 1874. Photo: Erkki Salminen, Ostrobothnian Museum, Vaasa. |
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| Fanny Churberg, Moon Rises Over Fog Bank, 1880. Photo: Erkki Salminen, Ostrobothnian Museum, Vaasa. |