Woman from Algiers

In November 1913, Siri Derkert (having completed her studies at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm) arrived in Paris, where she rented a large studio in the middle of Montparnasse. Since Derkert was poor, her dwellings were paid for by her close friend 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). A lively community of artists, from all over Europe, lived in these quarters in the years just before the First World War. There were also several private academies in the area, and Derkert visited both Académie Russe and Académie de la Grande Chaumière.

Derkert discovered Paris together with her friends from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm: Ninnan Santesson (1891 - 1969) and Lisa Bergstrand(1887 - 1955), who were both students of Antoine Bourdelle (1861 – 1929, influential and prolific French sculptor and teacher of, for example, Giacometti and Henri Matisse. Important figure in the Art Deco movement and the transition from the Beaux-Arts style to modern sculpture). The three explored the city and its museums; they sewed their own clothes after the Paris fashions; they socialized in Nordic artist circles and enjoyed organizing merry get-togethers and parties.

They also encountered new painting in the Salon d’Automne (Autumn Salon, 15 November 1913 - 8 January 1914), where the exhibited art, by Albert Gleizes, Francis Picabia and others, consisted of Cubism with a clear tendency towards abstraction. The young artist Ivan Lönnberg (1891 - 1918, Swedish modernist painter, marathon runner and soldier who died in World War I fighting for the French Foreign Legion), took them to Picasso’s dealer, Wilhelm von Uhde (1874 - 1947, German art collector, dealer, author and critic; early collector of modernist painting and a significant figure in the career of Henri Rousseau), where they probably saw the Spaniard’s work, which had not yet been widely exhibited.

Derkert’s own work was tentative. She was trying to find her own artistic language and spent a great deal of time drawing. Few pieces are preserved from this initial stay in Paris – one is the woodcut, Modellen (The Model). Derkert, Bergstrand and Santesson were then invited by a Swedish engineer to borrow a house in Algiers. They decided to accept the offer and went to Algeria in February 1914. They stayed for five weeks, setting up a studio in the house and engaging local models. Photographs also show how the female artists Derkert, Bergstrand and Santesson experienced an unusual sense of freedom of movement in Algiers.

The experience had great significance for Derkert’s artistic development. She was deeply struck by her encounters with exotic people and landscapes, as well as with a different, unfamiliar culture. Derkert translated these encounters and experiences into works like Woman in White Costume (1914, watercolour and pencil on paper, 32 x 25 cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm), Mauresque I (1914, oil on canvas, 71.5 x 49 cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm) and Woman from Algiers (Firestorm Foundation).

There is much to suggest that the bright colours under the North African sun had an effect on Derkert’s palette, which, by this time, was moving from greys to brighter tones. In the paintings from Algeria, figures and their surroundings often meld together in rich forms and colour combinations. Several studies portray an exotic view of the local people. A major part of Derkert’s work from Algeria was later stolen, but a small number of water-colours and also oils, probably produced in Paris after Derkert’s return in March 1914, remain.

Signed: ’S. Derkert’.

Provenance

Bukowskis, Stockholm, Bukowskis Moderną + Contemporary & Design, 28 April 2003, lot 69.

Private collection.

Firestorm Foundation.

Literature

Rolf Söderberg, Siri Derkert, 1974, p. 32.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation