Siri Derkert

Siri Derkert was a Swedish painter, sculptor and designer. Described as a ‘bird loving motorcycle-Marxist’ she was also a pioneering ardent advocate for peace, feminism and environmental issues. This commitment started in the early 1940s and grew during the rise of the Swedish peace movement in the 1950s, when Derkert became leader of the Stockholm section of the Svenska Kvinnors Vänsterförbund (the Swedish Women’s Left-wing Association). At the time the Swedish Security Service monitored all participants in that new movement and consequently her activities were meticulously recorded in their files.

Born in Stockholm, she initially trained at the Caleb Althin school of art, Stockholm (starting in 1904) and then went on to the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm (1911 - 1913). In 1913, Derkert moved to Paris where she studied at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, together with Swedish sculptors Ninnan Santesson (1891 - 1969) and Lisa Bergstrand (1887 - 1955), until the outbreak of World War I in the autumn of 1914. Before that, however, the three friends managed to spend five weeks in Algiers (in the spring of 1914), where Derkert was introduced to more vibrant and bolder colour schemes.

During and after the war she spent some time in Italy, where her first child Carlo (1915 - 1994, Swedish museum curator, one of the founders of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, where he also worked as an art educator specialising in schoolchildren) was born. Derkert later studied at the Kvinnliga medborgarskolan vid Fogelstad (Fogelstad Citizen School for Women: Swedish school for women, active from 1922 until 1954. The purpose of the center was to educate women about their newly affirmed rights and responsibilities as citizens after women suffrage had been achieved in 1921), where she arrived in September 1943. The stay proved inspirational for her later works.

Derkert is known as an artist with a strong personal and Expressionistic style. In her early works, particularly from her time in Paris, elements of both Cubism and Fauvism can be found. Worth mentioning here are paintings like Mandolinspelande flicka / Girl playing mandolin (1915, oil on canvas, 65 x 50 cm) and Nature Morte (1915, oil on canvas, 60 x 47 cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm). Interestingly enough, some of Derkert’s early works, for example, Donkey in Landscape (1915, pen, ink and crayon on paper, 22 x 17 cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm), also show surprising similarities to Marc Chagall’s paintings from the period. Derkert’s ambition to exhibit her cubist paintings was realized first in 1919 when they were included in Den frie udstilling (The Free Exhibition) in Copenhagen, and later the same year also in Lund, Sweden. In 1921 they were shown in the Aprilutställningen (April Exhibition) at Liljevalchs Konsthall (Liljevalchs Public Art Gallery) in Stockholm. Despite a positive reception from the press, it took decades before Derkert’s cubist work achieved a distinctive place in Swedish art history.

In tandem with her easel painting, Derkert also designed fashion plates, fashion collections and theatre costumes during the 1910s and early 1920s. Cubism was reflected in her designs, with geometric shapes and patterns made from the layering of fabric and stringing of beads/pearls to create square and rectangular shapes. The pearls and rich colours that she used reflected oriental and Egyptian influence in her costumes as well. At this time Ballets Russes (the Russian Ballet, an itinerant ballet company, conceived by Sergei Diaghilev in Paris, that performed between 1909 and 1929 throughout Europe, widely regarded as the most influential ballet company of the 20th century, since it promoted ground-breaking artistic collaborations among young choreographers, composers, designers, and dancers, all at the forefront of their several fields. Diaghilev commissioned works from composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Erik Satie and Maurice Ravel. Artists such as Vasily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse also worked for the company as did designers like Léon Bakst and Coco Chanel) heavily influenced fashion design and inspired an avant-garde dance show that she participated in producing in 1917. The show was staged in a theater in Stockholm known as the Intiman, with the collaboration of the artist Anna Petrus (1886–1949, Swedish sculptor, graphic artist, designer and dancer, remembered, in particular, for the pewter and cast iron works with the lion motif she designed in the mid-1920s for Svenskt Tenn, some of which are still produced today. Petrus also contributed to the design of the Swedish pavilion for the 1925 Paris Exhibition). Together they combined many art forms into a Gesamtkunstverk using dance, costumes, music and scenery. To the newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet, they stated: ‘We want the dance to be a work of art, which people can enjoy. Just as we try to express things in painting or sculpture, we are trying to do that in dance.’

Derkert’s costumes for Intiman in 1917 were discovered by Birgitta Glantzberg (1873 - 1951), the director of the fashion house Birgittaskolan in Stockholm. In the following years Derkert was commissioned to design several winter and summer collections for Birgittaskolan and she regularly travelled to Paris on its behalf. Some thirty water-colour drawings remain which, with timely elegance, show her feeling for colour and proportion. Derkert herself wore men’s bohemian style clothing including men’s trousers. This was common amongst women artists at this time to emphasize modernity and liberation.

Derkert acquired her first permanent dwelling in 1931 when her mother Valborg bought ‘Lillstugan’ (Little Cottage) on the island of Lidingö, Stockholm. Here in this erstwhile bakery and its garden she created her later work, still struggling to establish herself on the art scene. In conjunction with Derkert’s children’s portraits in her first solo exhibition at the Svensk-Franska Konstgalleriet (Swedish-French Art Gallery), Stockholm (1932), for instance, a critic described Derkert as the ‘evangelist of unconditional ugliness in modern art’. Her major breakthrough came in 1944, with a solo exhibition at the galleries Gösta Stenman and Stenman’s Daughter in Stockholm. The press, basically reviewing the same old children’s portraits, were, suddenly, enthusiastic : ‘Siri Derkert’s major exhibition flows like hot lava from an exploding volcano through the two floors. […] I wonder if the child in Swedish art has ever been painted with such burning insight and feeling. […] Painting that is expressionism in the correct sense of the word.’

Derkert now became more and more politically engaged. She was connected to Clarté, the left-socialist organization, and as of 1950, she was chairwoman of the Stockholm section of the Swedish Women’s Left-wing Association. In the article ‘Woman – means or goal?’, published in 1948 in the paper, Ny Dag (New Day), Derkert delivered crushing criticism of the reactionary values concerning the woman’s role in the home. Derkert now explored more explicit political content in her work. As she herself graduallybecame a public figure, with more and more attention from the media, clippings from newspapers on environmental damage and other current events began to crop up in her paintings. Her new collages recall her early cubism, but with the difference that now texts are given more prominence and their meaning adds a significant dimension to the work (thus, in many ways, preceding the internationally acclaimed art created by Corita Kent in the 1960s and 70s). She also produced several images in the form of placards, either as original models for posters as in the painting Amnesty International, (1963, mixed media on panel, 47 x 28 cm) or as lithographs, where pictorial motifs and slogans interact.

Throughout her adult life, Derkert participated in the broad political and medial discourse. In the beginning of the 1960s, she entered into yet another interesting sphere – the new avant-garde. Her cubist work attracted little interest in the 1910s, but the ‘cubist’, Siri Derkert, was launched in conjunction with her retrospective at Moderna Museet, Stockholm in 1960. The museum’s director, Pontus Hultén (1924 – 2006, Swedish art collector and museum director, regarded as one of the most distinguished museum professionals of the 20th century. Pioneering former head of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm and in the 1970s invited to participate in the creation of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, where he was the first director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, 1974–1981), the critic Ulf Linde (1929 – 2013, Swedish art critic, writer, museum director and member of the Swedish Academy. Director of the Thiel Gallery, Stockholm 1977-1997) and, not least, the curator, Carlo Derkert, her son, gathered together to highlight and celebrate her work. Derkert’s vital contemporary art, with its roots in the Parisian avant-garde of the 1910s, was now a vigorous exponent of the modernity and modernism that the museum would wish to be associated with. When the exhibition Rörelser i alla riktningar (‘Movements in all directions’), opened in April 1960, Derkert also became the first woman to hold a solo exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

The exhibition made Derkert known in wider circles. As did her public commission for the Östermalmstorg station of the Stockholm metro. Since the station was designed to serve as a shelter in case of a nuclear war, Derkert filled the walls with messages of peace, feminism and notes from revolutionary songs. Moderna Museet in Stockholm writes the following about Derkert’s 145 meters long Ristningar i naturbetong (Carvings in Natural Concrete), executed between 1961 and 1965:

Derkert’s Ristningar i naturbetong (Carvings in Natural Concrete) in the underground station at Östermalmstorg is, because of its size and complexity, one of the most innovative pieces of public art in post-war Sweden. The personal continues to be interwoven with the political through a 145 meterlong composition with drawings of figures, portraits, texts and music notation. Thematically, the piece revolves around peace, environmental questions, dance, music and rhythm. The music, from The Marseillaise and The Internationale, as well as the placement of the piece in one of Stockholm’s most high bourgeois quarters, made it controversial and meant that when it was unveiled in 1965, it incited lively debate – as it continues to do.

Derkert, at the age of 74, was then chosen to represent Sweden at the first exhibition in the newly-built Nordic pavilion at the Venice Biennial in 1962. Early cubist painting – but primarily, her large collages were shown in Venice. Several of these collages are now destroyed. Also shown were fragments with angel motifs, stars, birds in almost ethereal compositions, where Derkert’s interest in environmental themes is combined with and reinforces an almost spiritual theme. Her Biennial exhibition was highly regarded and returned her art to the avant-garde – where it originated but had not been given a place.

By this time, Derkert had been awarded the Prince Eugen Medal (conferred by the King of Sweden for ‘outstanding artistic achievement’) in 1960 and in July the same year she received the Guggenheim International Award of US$1,000 for her painting Fågel i topp (‘Bird on top’).

Siri Derkert passed away on 28 April 1973

Derkert’s work is represented at the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg, Sweden; Skissernas museum - Arkiv för dekorativ konst (Museum of Sketches for Public Art - Archive of Decorative Art), Lund, Sweden; Norrköping Museum of Art, Norrköping, Sweden and Kalmar Museum of Art, Kalmar, Sweden.

Her work can also be found on a stamp issued by the Swedish postal service in 1982, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Elin Wägner (1882 – 1949, Swedish writer, journalist, feminist, teacher, ecologist and pacifist. Member of the Swedish Academy from 1944. Considered one of the most important and influential feminist pioneers in Sweden).

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