A female art colony?

 

“Ljus över hav och land. Önningebykolonin på Åland” is a book and exhibition catalogue published by Waldemarsudde in Sweden. The publication year is 2022. Waldemarsudde is an art museum in Stockholm and the former domicile of Prince Eugen (1865-1947), who was a patron of painters and a painter himself. And yes, the “prince” is his actual title, Eugen being the son of King Oscar II. This particular book has no connection to Eugen´s artistic endeavors, however. Frankly, “Ljus över hav och land” is quite boring, unless extremely local landscape painting is your thing, the locale in question being Önningeby at Åland, or perhaps Åland in general. Late 19^th century Åland, that is. Think peasant women working, peasant men working just as much, trees, windmills, coastlines, that kind of stuff.

Åland is an archipelago in the Baltic Sea. The population is Swedish, but Sweden lost Åland to Russia after a major war in 1808-1809. During the same conflict, Sweden also lost Finland to the Russians. Åland was administered as part of the so-called Grand Duchy of Finland until 1917, Finland of course being under Russian overlordship. When Finland became independent in 1917, Sweden wanted Åland back, but eventually the islands became a self-governing territory sorting under Finland, a status they still enjoy.

In 1886, an “art colony” was established at Önningeby, a farming village at Åland. Such “colonies” were apparently quite common all over Europe at the time, forming part of an emerging artistic subculture. Or perhaps demimonde? The colony lasted until 1914, when World War I broke out and the artists left in a hurry. Most members of the colony seem to have been Swedish painters from Finland (there is a Swedish-speaking minority in Finland), which is natural, since Åland´s farming population presumably only spoke Swedish. Most of the artists rented rooms or houses from the local peasants. The leaders of the colony were Victor Westerholm and his wife Hilma (who wasn´t a painter). Another prominent member was the Sweden-Swedish (to coin a phrase) J. A. G. Acke. What made the community unique among European art colonies was that the majority of its members were female, many of them painters in their own right.

I don´t think the articles in the exhibition catalogue are *that* good at explaining this peculiar state of affairs. As already noted, art colonies were an important part of the lifestyle and networking of a certain kind of late 19^th century European painters. There must have been something counter-cultural about them, August Strindberg (the famous writer from Sweden) complaining about rank lesbianism when visiting a French art colony! Önningeby seems to have been much less raunchy, but it was still vaguely alternative since it offered female painters an opportunity to socialize, paint and sell their art. The usual norm at the time was that women were supposed to give up their educations and careers (if any) at marriage.

Other factors also contributed to the establishment of art colonies in the rural hinterland, such as new trends in painting itself, landscape and portrait painting becoming more realistic than before. There were also more or less explicit nationalist sentiments at work, the painters perhaps trying to find something “authentically national”. This kind of art colonies apparently disappeared with the advent of so-called modernism in art, since the modernists extolled the city over the countryside, and weren´t interested in artistic realism anyway. Still, counter-cultural communes certainly continued to exist even after World War I, so perhaps the authors´ perspective is a bit narrow here?

All that being said, “Ljus över hav och land” is mostly just an art book with Åland-related landscape and portrait paintings (and some still lifes thrown in for good measure). Good if you are an Ålandese local patriot, I suppose.