Modern Women Artists in the Nordic Countries, 1900–1960

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.

INTRODUCTION She Is No Gentle Lamb in the Cave of the Werewolf: Modern Women Artists in the Nordic Countries KERRY GREAVES SECTION 1: Critical Reconsiderations, New Languages of Interpretation 1. The Work of Júlíana Sveinsdóttir: Engaging Issues of Gender and Colonial Subjectivity HLYNUR HELGASON 2. The Symbolic Abstraction of Else Alfelt KAREN KURCZYNSKI 3. Women Pioneers of Abstraction in 1950s Norway: The Balancing Act of Aase Texmon Rygh, Inger Sitter, and Gudrun Kongelf SIGRUN ASEBO 4. Movement and the Living Surface: Greenlandic Modernism, Pia Arke, and the Decolonial Legacy of Women Artists in Greenland CHARISSA VON HARRINGA SECTION 2: Interventions, Transmissions, Networks 5. Gabriele Münter and the 1917 Exhibition of the Föreningen Svenska Konstnärinnor and Vereinigung Bildende Künstlerinnen Österreichs SHULAMITH BEHR 6. Modern Corporeality: Body, Movement, and Dance in Ellen Thesleff’s Art HANNA-REETTA SCHRECK 7. Women Artists in and around the Danish Journal linien MARIANNE OLHOLM 8. No One Creates Alone: Past and Present in a Common Reading of Artist Sonja Ferlov Mancoba YVETTE BRACKMAN, JOHANNE LOGSTRUP, AND PIA RONICKE SECTION 3: Subversive Spaces, Collaborations, and Reclamations 9. Collaboration and Co-Habitation: Swedish Women Artists at the Turn of the Century KATARINA WADSTEIN MACLEOD 10. “Women Need Work, and Work Needs Women”: Women Artists and Their Networks in Fin de Siècle Sweden JOANN CONRAD 11. Shady Plants, Ecstatic Trees, and Vulva Seashells: Symbols of Erotic Nature in the Surrealist Work of Rita Kernn-Larsen and Elsa Thoresen MARIE ARLETH SKOV 12. Anneliese Hager, Cobra, and the Camera-less Photograph LYNETTE ROTH SECTION 4: Subjectivities, Identity, and Self-Fashioning 13. Elsa Laula, Astri Aasen, and the Ascent of Sámi Visual Sovereignty, 1904–1917 BART PUSHAW 14. Emancipated Bodies: Anna Klindt Sørensen Paints the Female Nude ULLA ANGKJAR JORGENSEN 15. Elaboration of the “New Woman” Figure by Women Artists in Interwar Finland TUTTA PALIN 16. Soft Bones: Sonja Ferlov Mancoba and the Reconfiguration of Anatomy EMIL LETH MEILVANG SECTION 5: Alternative Practices of Agency and Resistance 17. Dealing with Circles: Franciska Clausen and Her Position in the Group Cercle et Carré (1929–1930) METTE HOJSGAARD 18. Surrealist Beasts: Greta Knutson’s Strategy of “Performative Refusal” MARTIN SUNDBERG 19. The Representation of Lack, the Matter of Imagination: Hannah Ryggen, Aesthetics of Resistance, and Art against Fascism ZOFIA CIELATKOWSKA 20. Intra-Actions with Nature (and Beyond): Hilma af Klint, Else Alfelt, and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba TINA MARIANE KROGH MADSEN

Kerry Greaves is Assistant Professor in Art History in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.