ABSTRACT

This transnational volume examines innovative women artists who were from, or worked in, Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sápmi, and Sweden from the emergence of modernism until the feminist movement took shape in the 1960s.

The book addresses the culturally specific conditions that shaped Nordic artists’ contributions, brings the latest methodological and feminist approaches to bear on Nordic art history, and engages a wide international audience through the contributors’ subject matter and analysis. Rather than introducing a new history of "rediscovered" women artists, the book is more concerned with understanding the mechanisms and structures that affected women artists and their work, while suggesting alternative ways of constructing women’s art histories. Artists covered include Else Alfelt, Pia Arke, Franciska Clausen, Jessie Kleemann, Hilma af Klint, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Greta Knutson, Aase Texmon Rygh, Hannah Ryggen, Júlíana Sveinsdóttir, Ellen Thesleff, and Astri Aasen.

The target audience includes scholars working in art history, cultural studies, feminist studies, gender studies, curatorial studies, Nordic studies, postcolonial studies, and visual studies.

part |12 pages

Introduction

chapter |10 pages

She Is No Gentle Lamb in the Cave of the Werewolf

Modern Women Artists in the Nordic Countries

part Section 1|50 pages

Critical Reconsiderations, New Languages of Interpretation

chapter 1|11 pages

The Work of Júlíana Sveinsdóttir

Engaging Issues of Gender and Colonial Subjectivity

chapter 3|12 pages

Women Pioneers of Abstraction in 1950s Norway

The Balancing Act of Aase Texmon Rygh, Inger Sitter, and Gudrun Kongelf

chapter 4|12 pages

Movement and the Living Surface

Greenlandic Modernism, Pia Arke, and the Decolonial Legacy of Women Artists in Greenland

part Section 2|46 pages

Interventions, Transmissions, Networks

chapter 6|11 pages

Modern Corporeality

Body, Movement, and Dance in Ellen Thesleff’s Art

chapter 8|10 pages

No One Creates Alone

Past and Present in a Common Reading of Artist Sonja Ferlov Mancoba

part Section 3|48 pages

Subversive Spaces, Collaborations, and Reclamations

chapter 9|11 pages

Collaboration and Co-Habitation

Swedish Women Artists at the Turn of the Century

chapter 10|12 pages

“Women Need Work, and Work Needs Women”

Women Artists and Their Networks in Fin de Siècle Sweden 1

chapter 11|12 pages

Shady Plants, Ecstatic Trees, and Vulva Seashells

Symbols of Erotic Nature in the Surrealist Work of Rita Kernn-Larsen and Elsa Thoresen

part Section 4|47 pages

Subjectivities, Identity, and Self-Fashioning

chapter 14|11 pages

Emancipated Bodies

Anna Klindt Sørensen Paints the Female Nude

chapter 16|11 pages

Soft Bones

Sonja Ferlov Mancoba and the Reconfiguration of Anatomy

part Section 5|46 pages

Alternative Practices of Agency and Resistance

chapter 17|11 pages

Dealing with Circles

Franciska Clausen and Her Position in the Group Cercle et Carré (1929–1930)

chapter 18|11 pages

Surrealist Beasts

Greta Knutson’s Strategy of “Performative Refusal”

chapter 19|11 pages

The Representation of Lack, the Matter of Imagination

Hannah Ryggen, Aesthetics of Resistance, and Art against Fascism

chapter 20|11 pages

Intra-Actions with Nature (and Beyond)

Hilma af Klint, Else Alfelt, and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba