Flickan med håret (The girl with the hair)

Anna Petrus’ sculpture Flickan med håret (The girl with the hair), an extremely rare example of her early work, was executed during the same period as her famous Mother and Child / La Maternité (a larger granite version of which, since 2014, is on public display in Uppsala, Sweden). By this time, the late 1910s, Petrus’ sculptural work was maturing into a style much appreciated by the art-loving community in Stockholm. Art critic Gregor Paulsson (1889 - 1977, Swedish art historian; curator at Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, 1916 - 1924, and professor of art history at Uppsala University, 1934 - 1956), for example, favourably reviewed (in Stockholms Dagblad) Petrus’ February 1916 debut solo exhibition: ‘[…] the entire body is incorporated within one rhythm, where the planes meet, where one cannot speak of a silhouette, can no longer be tempted to analyse and contemplate, only to receive. This is estimable work […] she will not, I suspect, be any run-of-the-mill sculptress.’

Petrus’ recognised position as an established artist was confirmed the following year when she, together with Sigrid Hjertén and Gabriele Münter, was specially invited to contribute to the Swedish Women Artists’s exhibition at Liljevalchs Public Art Gallery, Stockholm (January - February 1917), where she showed fifteen sculptures (in plaster, birch and marble) and three linoleum cuts.

By the time that Petrus had created Flickan med håret (The girl with the hair), further exhibitions were on the horizon in 1919. Petrus and Siri Derkert (who had become a close friend of Petrus when they attended the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm together) planned to begin a touring exhibition in Copenhagen before continuing to Lund University Art Museum in Lund, Sweden. Some of Petrus’ work (including Flickan med håret) in that exhibition was later also shown at the Valand School of Fine Art in Gothenburg, Sweden. Marie Rehnberg (born 1954, Swedish art historian specialising in 20th-century Swedish art and design) writes (in Anna Petrus. Sculptor, Designer and Pioneer, 2022):

The choice of venue in Copenhagen fell on Den Frie Udstilling [The Free Exhibition] in the east of the city centre. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, young artists around Europe revolted against the teaching offered at art schools and the lack of opportunities to exhibit their work. In Copenhagen, protests against the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at Charlottenborg led to the founding of the Den Frie Udstilling in 1891, one of the oldest artists associations in the world and still very much active. […] The reviews published in the daily press from the critics who attended the exhibitions in Copenhagen, Lund and, to a certain extent, Gothenburg generally greet Petrus earnest venture into sculpture with interest and respect. Sculpture exhibitions were not common. No list of works or catalogue from the Den Frie exhibition has been discovered; however, from a simple booklet from the Lund exhibition it is possible to see what has been added since her exhibition at the Swedish Association for Art three years earlier. Many of the works are familiar and although the additions are few - after all, she had given birth twice in that period - they are all the more interesting for that. […] It is a fine conclusion to Petrus’ production for the decade, and a springboard for the next phase of her artistic development. 

The new decade could hardly have got off to a worse start for Petrus. In 1920, almost a year after the Copenhagen exhibition, a solo exhibition was being mounted for Petrus at the recently opened Swedish-French Art Gallery in Stockholm. The gallery, founded by physiotherapist Gösta Olson (1883 - 1966, Swedish gymnast and fencer who won a gold medal in the 1908 Summer Olympics) had opened late in 1918 with an exhibition of Olson’s own collection of works by artists like Auguste Renoir (1841 - 1919), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 - 1901) and Odilon Redon (1840 - 1916). Further exhibitions followed with French artists like Henri Matisse (1869 - 1954), Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973), Georges Braque (1882 - 1963) and Fernand Léger (1881 - 1955). Olson was also keen to promote young Swedish talent, so a show (the fourteenth since the inauguration of the gallery) was planned for Petrus in the spring of 1920. That’s when disaster struck. Rehnberg writes:

Petrus had invested a great deal of time and energy and was looking forward to exhibiting her work on home soil, this time exclusively sculptures, no etchings were to be shown. In the middle of the night a few weeks before the vernissage, fire broke out in her studio in the Tennis Pavilion, where her young family lived. All four of them escaped the blaze, but only a small part of Petrus’ preparations and sculptures could be saved. A total of 14 works and a few photographs of destroyed sculptures were eventually shown. To fill the space, the gallery hastily assembled an exhibition of works by the nineteenth century French painter Constantin Guys.

Rehnberg’s text explains the seemingly unconventional joint presentation of Petrus and Guys, which, after all, opened on the 17th of March 1920 with Flickan med håret (The girl with the hair) as one of its focal points and highlights. And, as stated by the auction catalogue entry when Firestorm Foundation acquired Flickan med håret (The girl with the hair): ‘That this particular piece is still with us thus constitutes a minor sensation.’

Signed on the base: ‘A. Petrus’.

Provenance

The collection of the artist’s brother-in-law Gunnar Lyttkens (1898-1962) and his wife Dagmar Engström (1900-1993), as a gift from Anna Petrus.

Private collection (through inheritance from the above), c. 1993 - 2025.

Uppsala Auktionskammare, Stockholm, Important Sale, 13 - 15 May 2025, lot 869 (consigned by the above).

Firestorm Foundation (acquired at the above sale).

Exhibitions

Den Frie, Copenhagen, Tre svenska konstnärinnor - Siri Derkert, Anna Petrus och Ninie Bergsten, February 1919.

Lunds universitets konstmuseum (Lund University Art Museum), Lund, Sweden, Utställning Siri Derkert och Anna Petrus, 9 - 25 March 1919, no. 63.

Valand, Gothenburg, Sweden, Anna Petrus, 5 - 15 April 1919.

Svensk-Franska Konstgalleriet, Stockholm, Utställning Anna Petrus, Constantin Guys, 17 March - 6 April 1920,no. 11.

Bror Hjorths Hus, Uppsala, Sweden, Anna Petrus - konstnär och formgivare, 9 April - 29 May 2005.

Literature

(Ed.) Sonja Lyttkens, Anna Petrus: konstnär och formgivare, 2005, illustrated p. 18.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation