ESTER HENNING. Still life with flowers.
Description
Mixed media on panel 70 x 46 cm. Signed EH.
Ester Henning's life is undeniably one of the most poignant in Swedish art history. She was born 28 October 1887 in Yngshyttan, north of Filipstad, as the daughter of shoemaker Carl Johan Henning and his wife Lovisa. The couple had a total of eight children and one lived in very small circumstances. After four years at the folk school, Ester was sent to Mora, where she was already at the age of 12 or 13 she was allowed to start “her career as a servant of strangers”, to use the artist's own words. Her proclivity for drawing was noticed and encouraged by a food mother in one of the homes where she worked. From 1900 to 1911, Ester lived in Mora and there has been much speculation about the influence that Zorn may possibly have had on her artist dreams.
In 1911 she went to Stockholm, where various jobs were interspersed with four semesters of sporadic studies at the Technical School. During her studies she had shown the greatest interest in figure modeling and it was also within this art that Ester was noticed in an article in Idun in 1915 entitled “From Automatic Disker to Sculptor. Ester Henning and her art”. The article shows the great hardships she endured in the various workplaces. However, the situation would get even worse. Unemployed and penniless, Ester was arrested on 17 April 1916 at Riddarhustorget for “violence against Constable Jansson”. The following day, she is taken to Katarina Hospital “for insanity,” as the police report states. After five weeks she was discharged as healthy, but with a diagnosis of Dementia praecox, what we today call schizophrenia. Three years later, she had to be admitted to a mental hospital again, this time at Säters hospital. Esther had then had delusions that her parents were trying to hypnotize her into “getting weird” and she had, as a result, cut off the electrical wiring in her parents' house and hit a frying pan into her mother's head.
During the first three or four years at Säter, Ester Henning continues her artistic creation, but then her condition deteriorates markedly, she was struck, was “capricious” and “unrestrained” and ran around naked. After six years at Säter, she ends up at Uppsala hospital, which had previously seen names such as Gustaf Fröding and Ernst Josephson among its patients. After that, she spent a few years at Långbro. When the newly built Beckomberga - one of Europe's largest mental hospitals, accommodating over 1600 patients - opens in 1932, Ester is moved there. She is then autistic and occasionally also mutistic. Ester Henning first ends up in a department for “lethargic and unstylish”, but after some time she is transferred to a chronicler's department, Ward 22. In the ward there was an eight-bed monitoring hall and this bleak setting was to become Ester Henning's home for over 40 years.
The strange thing happens, however, is that this broken-down woman, in an anything but inspiring residential setting, will create art that is among our country's most fascinating and poignant. It all happens thanks to curator Janny-Lisa Clason, who, when she is hired at Beckomberga in 1936, is told by the staff about how Ester had tried to draw with a piece of charcoal on toilet paper and how she had mashed flower petals between her fingers and drawn with the plant mass on the underside of the chair seats. The far-sighted curator makes sure that Ester gets crayons and paper. This gives the artist the opportunity to start creating for real.
For obvious reasons, Ester Henning's subject world becomes limited to the environment that existed within the walls of the hospital. Much of her output depicts vistas with Beckomberga's barracks-like pavilions. Sitting in bed, she captured these environments, which she could see through the window of the dormitory. There are also other floral motifs. A significant circle of motifs make up her portrayals of her fellow patients. Most of the portraits were added without the model's knowledge. Esther used to sit in a corner of the dayroom and observe and study the other patients for a long time, and then, with her crayons, hastily affix someone's features to the paper. The portraits were often an amalgamation of current hallmarks and memorial remnants from previous encounters with the depicted. Not least, there is an imprint of the artist's own emotional state in these works. For Esther, portraits meant something other than depiction. She was in a particularly magical relationship with the images and initially she watched over them, letting no outsider either see or acquire them.
The artist's quick and expressive manner of work gives the portraits a striking nerve. They almost seem to vibrate with a life force, which overturns the usual image of mental patients as broken down into body and soul. Esther may have seen her own unrelenting power even in her fellow patients or she had it transmitted to them in the portraits.
Many of Ester Henning's subjects are executed with frequent bursts of strokes and these images give clear associations to the feverish paintings Sigrid Hjertén created during her last active years. One of Ester's fellow patients in ward 22 at Beckomberga was Sigrid Hjertén. She was hospitalized at Beckomberga in installments from 1936 until her death in the suites of a failed lobotomy in 1948. The relationship between the two artists was strained. Sigrid, who did not paint during this period, found it difficult to accept that others engaged in painting and Esther was not late to defend herself. “The ladies warred with each other” so that for a time one had to separate them. Isaac Grünewald demanded that Sigrid be allowed to stay in the ward, and Ester was therefore forced to spend some time in another ward. Despite all the antagonism, Sigrid Hjertén took an interest in Ester's art and then mainly in the portraits. Sigrid's comments, which were written down by a junior doctor deeply involved in Ester's oeuvre, were — albeit positive — usually quite toxic. “You can look at it without vomiting,” was the opinion of one of the portraits.
Ester Henning's artistry would reach a larger audience than the hospital staff and Sigrid Hjertén. In May 1946, the exhibition “Schizophrenic Art” was organized in Gothenburg. The one who had the most works included in the exhibition was Esther. Among the other artists were names such as Carl Fredrik Hill and Ernst Josephson. On the day of the opening, one of Ester's portraits was depicted on the front page of Göteborgs-Tidningen and she received very good criticism from the reviewers. Highlighting the interest in the exhibition was that it was as much rewritten as the simultaneously ongoing major van Gogh exhibition.
After being locked up in Ward 22 at Beckomberga for 15 years, Ester was given clearance, which meant an opportunity to leave the ward on her own. She had by then been locked up for a total of 28 years in various mental hospitals. Three years later, she received an access card and thus permission to leave the hospital grounds. With the newfound freedom, she explored nature and picked flowers, which she could then paint from. Her dearest subject, however, was the machinist's cottage in the hospital grounds, which she painted over fifty times, always in different colours.
Ester Henning experienced an even greater sense of freedom in 1969 when she was transferred from Beckomberga to Bolmängens Sickhem in Flen, a small private hospital with only 20 guests. For the first time in her life, the now 80-year-old Ester got a room of her own. From her window she could see a wooded hill with two large boulders, a motif she depicted numerous times. The three years that she spent in Flen became an artistically very productive period. This period also coincided with another public appearance. In 1970, a major presentation of her work was given when the Swedish Artists' Association organized an anniversary exhibition at Liljevalchs, where Ester Henning participated as a special invitation with no less than 175 works filling the largest hall at Liljevalchs. The director of the hospital drove Ester to Stockholm and Liljevalchs, where a small reception committee including Janny-Lisa Clason was waiting. However, Esther at first refused to enter Liljevalchs. Instead, she sat for a couple of hours on the stairs outside. When she finally entered the art hall, she first looked closely at all the works of the other artists and said that they were fine, after which she entered the largest exhibition hall, where her own works hung. She crept carefully for the walls and did not say a word. The tears just ran.
After three years in Flen, however, the relative freedom was over. Ester had become quite heavy and immobile over the years, and as her immobility increased, she eventually could no longer remain in the private infirmary. Instead, she was allowed to return to existence in Ward 22 at Beckomberga.
Ester Henning spent her last seven years as a long-term care patient at Solberga Hospital in Älvsjö, outside Stockholm. She was now both blind and deaf and, moreover, unable to get out of the crib, which somehow became a definitive symbol of the confinement to which she had been subjected for most of her life. On 1 May 1985, Ester Hening passed away at the age of 97 and she was buried in the family grave at Mora new cemetery. She had finally been allowed to come home.
Source: Irja Bergström “Ester Henning — Kvinnofate, Artists' Dream, Anstastliv” (Carlsson Bokförlag, 2001)
Nationalmuseum owns a large collection of Ester Henning's crayon drawings and at Moderna Museet there is her portrait of Sigrid Hjertén in crayon, she is also represented at the Danish Arts Council and at Värmland Museum.
Ester Henning's artistry has continued to fascinate new generations. In 2001, her art was exhibited at Bror Hjorths Hus in Uppsala and in the same year Irja Bergström's book about the artist “Ester Henning — Kvinno, Artists' Dream...
Sale price
Estimate
Time, Location
Auction House
Description
Mixed media on panel 70 x 46 cm. Signed EH.
Ester Henning's life is undeniably one of the most poignant in Swedish art history. She was born 28 October 1887 in Yngshyttan, north of Filipstad, as the daughter of shoemaker Carl Johan Henning and his wife Lovisa. The couple had a total of eight children and one lived in very small circumstances. After four years at the folk school, Ester was sent to Mora, where she was already at the age of 12 or 13 she was allowed to start “her career as a servant of strangers”, to use the artist's own words. Her proclivity for drawing was noticed and encouraged by a food mother in one of the homes where she worked. From 1900 to 1911, Ester lived in Mora and there has been much speculation about the influence that Zorn may possibly have had on her artist dreams.
In 1911 she went to Stockholm, where various jobs were interspersed with four semesters of sporadic studies at the Technical School. During her studies she had shown the greatest interest in figure modeling and it was also within this art that Ester was noticed in an article in Idun in 1915 entitled “From Automatic Disker to Sculptor. Ester Henning and her art”. The article shows the great hardships she endured in the various workplaces. However, the situation would get even worse. Unemployed and penniless, Ester was arrested on 17 April 1916 at Riddarhustorget for “violence against Constable Jansson”. The following day, she is taken to Katarina Hospital “for insanity,” as the police report states. After five weeks she was discharged as healthy, but with a diagnosis of Dementia praecox, what we today call schizophrenia. Three years later, she had to be admitted to a mental hospital again, this time at Säters hospital. Esther had then had delusions that her parents were trying to hypnotize her into “getting weird” and she had, as a result, cut off the electrical wiring in her parents' house and hit a frying pan into her mother's head.
During the first three or four years at Säter, Ester Henning continues her artistic creation, but then her condition deteriorates markedly, she was struck, was “capricious” and “unrestrained” and ran around naked. After six years at Säter, she ends up at Uppsala hospital, which had previously seen names such as Gustaf Fröding and Ernst Josephson among its patients. After that, she spent a few years at Långbro. When the newly built Beckomberga - one of Europe's largest mental hospitals, accommodating over 1600 patients - opens in 1932, Ester is moved there. She is then autistic and occasionally also mutistic. Ester Henning first ends up in a department for “lethargic and unstylish”, but after some time she is transferred to a chronicler's department, Ward 22. In the ward there was an eight-bed monitoring hall and this bleak setting was to become Ester Henning's home for over 40 years.
The strange thing happens, however, is that this broken-down woman, in an anything but inspiring residential setting, will create art that is among our country's most fascinating and poignant. It all happens thanks to curator Janny-Lisa Clason, who, when she is hired at Beckomberga in 1936, is told by the staff about how Ester had tried to draw with a piece of charcoal on toilet paper and how she had mashed flower petals between her fingers and drawn with the plant mass on the underside of the chair seats. The far-sighted curator makes sure that Ester gets crayons and paper. This gives the artist the opportunity to start creating for real.
For obvious reasons, Ester Henning's subject world becomes limited to the environment that existed within the walls of the hospital. Much of her output depicts vistas with Beckomberga's barracks-like pavilions. Sitting in bed, she captured these environments, which she could see through the window of the dormitory. There are also other floral motifs. A significant circle of motifs make up her portrayals of her fellow patients. Most of the portraits were added without the model's knowledge. Esther used to sit in a corner of the dayroom and observe and study the other patients for a long time, and then, with her crayons, hastily affix someone's features to the paper. The portraits were often an amalgamation of current hallmarks and memorial remnants from previous encounters with the depicted. Not least, there is an imprint of the artist's own emotional state in these works. For Esther, portraits meant something other than depiction. She was in a particularly magical relationship with the images and initially she watched over them, letting no outsider either see or acquire them.
The artist's quick and expressive manner of work gives the portraits a striking nerve. They almost seem to vibrate with a life force, which overturns the usual image of mental patients as broken down into body and soul. Esther may have seen her own unrelenting power even in her fellow patients or she had it transmitted to them in the portraits.
Many of Ester Henning's subjects are executed with frequent bursts of strokes and these images give clear associations to the feverish paintings Sigrid Hjertén created during her last active years. One of Ester's fellow patients in ward 22 at Beckomberga was Sigrid Hjertén. She was hospitalized at Beckomberga in installments from 1936 until her death in the suites of a failed lobotomy in 1948. The relationship between the two artists was strained. Sigrid, who did not paint during this period, found it difficult to accept that others engaged in painting and Esther was not late to defend herself. “The ladies warred with each other” so that for a time one had to separate them. Isaac Grünewald demanded that Sigrid be allowed to stay in the ward, and Ester was therefore forced to spend some time in another ward. Despite all the antagonism, Sigrid Hjertén took an interest in Ester's art and then mainly in the portraits. Sigrid's comments, which were written down by a junior doctor deeply involved in Ester's oeuvre, were — albeit positive — usually quite toxic. “You can look at it without vomiting,” was the opinion of one of the portraits.
Ester Henning's artistry would reach a larger audience than the hospital staff and Sigrid Hjertén. In May 1946, the exhibition “Schizophrenic Art” was organized in Gothenburg. The one who had the most works included in the exhibition was Esther. Among the other artists were names such as Carl Fredrik Hill and Ernst Josephson. On the day of the opening, one of Ester's portraits was depicted on the front page of Göteborgs-Tidningen and she received very good criticism from the reviewers. Highlighting the interest in the exhibition was that it was as much rewritten as the simultaneously ongoing major van Gogh exhibition.
After being locked up in Ward 22 at Beckomberga for 15 years, Ester was given clearance, which meant an opportunity to leave the ward on her own. She had by then been locked up for a total of 28 years in various mental hospitals. Three years later, she received an access card and thus permission to leave the hospital grounds. With the newfound freedom, she explored nature and picked flowers, which she could then paint from. Her dearest subject, however, was the machinist's cottage in the hospital grounds, which she painted over fifty times, always in different colours.
Ester Henning experienced an even greater sense of freedom in 1969 when she was transferred from Beckomberga to Bolmängens Sickhem in Flen, a small private hospital with only 20 guests. For the first time in her life, the now 80-year-old Ester got a room of her own. From her window she could see a wooded hill with two large boulders, a motif she depicted numerous times. The three years that she spent in Flen became an artistically very productive period. This period also coincided with another public appearance. In 1970, a major presentation of her work was given when the Swedish Artists' Association organized an anniversary exhibition at Liljevalchs, where Ester Henning participated as a special invitation with no less than 175 works filling the largest hall at Liljevalchs. The director of the hospital drove Ester to Stockholm and Liljevalchs, where a small reception committee including Janny-Lisa Clason was waiting. However, Esther at first refused to enter Liljevalchs. Instead, she sat for a couple of hours on the stairs outside. When she finally entered the art hall, she first looked closely at all the works of the other artists and said that they were fine, after which she entered the largest exhibition hall, where her own works hung. She crept carefully for the walls and did not say a word. The tears just ran.
After three years in Flen, however, the relative freedom was over. Ester had become quite heavy and immobile over the years, and as her immobility increased, she eventually could no longer remain in the private infirmary. Instead, she was allowed to return to existence in Ward 22 at Beckomberga.
Ester Henning spent her last seven years as a long-term care patient at Solberga Hospital in Älvsjö, outside Stockholm. She was now both blind and deaf and, moreover, unable to get out of the crib, which somehow became a definitive symbol of the confinement to which she had been subjected for most of her life. On 1 May 1985, Ester Hening passed away at the age of 97 and she was buried in the family grave at Mora new cemetery. She had finally been allowed to come home.
Source: Irja Bergström “Ester Henning — Kvinnofate, Artists' Dream, Anstastliv” (Carlsson Bokförlag, 2001)
Nationalmuseum owns a large collection of Ester Henning's crayon drawings and at Moderna Museet there is her portrait of Sigrid Hjertén in crayon, she is also represented at the Danish Arts Council and at Värmland Museum.
Ester Henning's artistry has continued to fascinate new generations. In 2001, her art was exhibited at Bror Hjorths Hus in Uppsala and in the same year Irja Bergström's book about the artist “Ester Henning — Kvinno, Artists' Dream...
Sale price
Estimate
Time, Location
Auction House
