Modern Women Artists in the Nordic Countries 1900–1960

<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>The target audience includes scholars working in art history, cultural studies, feminist studies, gender studies, curatorial studies, Nordic studies, postcolonial studies, and visual studies.</p> <p><strong>INTRODUCTION</strong> She Is No Gentle Lamb in the Cave of the Werewolf: Modern Women Artists in the Nordic Countries <strong>SECTION 1:</strong><strong>Critical Reconsiderations, New Languages of Interpretation</strong> 1. The Work of Júlíana Sveinsdóttir: Engaging Issues of Gender and Colonial Subjectivity 2. The Symbolic Abstraction of Else Alfelt 3. Women Pioneers of Abstraction in 1950s Norway: The Balancing Act of Aase Texmon Rygh, Inger Sitter, and Gudrun Kongelf 4. Movement and the Living Surface: Greenlandic Modernism, Pia Arke, and the Decolonial Legacy of Women Artists in Greenland <strong>SECTION 2:</strong><strong>Interventions, Transmissions, Networks</strong> 5. Gabriele Münter and the 1917 Exhibition of the Föreningen Svenska Konstnärinnor and Vereinigung Bildende Künstlerinnen Österreichs 6. Modern Corporeality: Body, Movement, and Dance in Ellen Thesleff’s Art 7. Women Artists in and around the Danish Journal <i>linien </i>8. No One Creates Alone: Past and Present in a Common Reading of Artist Sonja Ferlov Mancoba <strong>SECTION 3:</strong><strong>Subversive Spaces, Collaborations, and Reclamations</strong> 9. Collaboration and Co-Habitation: Swedish Women Artists at the Turn of the Century 10. “Women Need Work, and Work Needs Women”: Women Artists and Their Networks in <i>Fin de Siècle </i>Sweden 11. Shady Plants, Ecstatic Trees, and Vulva Seashells: Symbols of Erotic Nature in the Surrealist Work of Rita Kernn-Larsen and Elsa Thoresen 12. Anneliese Hager, Cobra, and the Camera-less Photograph <strong>SECTION 4:</strong><strong>Subjectivities, Identity, and Self-Fashioning</strong> 13. Elsa Laula, Astri Aasen, and the Ascent of Sámi Visual Sovereignty, 1904–1917 14. Emancipated Bodies: Anna Klindt Sørensen Paints the Female Nude 15. Elaboration of the “New Woman” Figure by Women Artists in Interwar Finland 16. Soft Bones: Sonja Ferlov Mancoba and the Reconfiguration of Anatomy <strong>SECTION 5:</strong><strong>Alternative Practices of Agency and Resistance</strong> 17. Dealing with Circles: Franciska Clausen and Her Position in the Group Cercle et Carré (1929–1930) 18. Surrealist Beasts: Greta Knutson’s Strategy of “Performative Refusal” 19. The Representation of Lack, the Matter of Imagination: Hannah Ryggen, Aesthetics of Resistance, and Art against Fascism 20. Intra-Actions with Nature (and Beyond): Hilma af Klint, Else Alfelt, and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba</p>