När yta blir mening : Perception, materialitet och performativitet i Helene Schjerfbecks landskapsmåleri

Sammanfattning

Abstract This thesis examines four of Helene Schjerfbeck’s landscape paintings during the period 1880–1920 through a performative and post-iconographic perspective. Grounded in a theoretical bricolage-structure including phenomenology, reception aesthetics, and feminist art history, the study investigates how meaning emerges in the encounter between the image and its materiality, viewer, and historical context. The argument is constructed through a three-step analysis, understood not as a linear progression but as three complementary viewing positions: description; historical and social context; and performativity and agency. The analysis shows that Schjerfbeck’s landscapes function as visual structures that organize the viewer’s perception through color, reduction, sense of space, and compositional rhythm. Rather than confirming national ideals or symbolic readings, the paintings create shifting viewer positions characterized by uncertainty, proximity, distance, and bodily orientation. The study demonstrates how Schjerfbeck’s landscapes may be understood as a kind of third way – a perceptual and performative modernism – in relation to artistic ideals and national ideology in turn-of-the-century landscape painting. In this sense, the paintings do not simply depict the world, but come into being through the act of seeing. The thesis thus contributes to previous research by shifting focus from biographical interpretation to landscape as a performative pictorial practice.