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| Sami Working with Reindeer, 1943. Emilie Demant Hatt, Nordiska Museet |
It was about ten years
ago that I first saw Emilie Demant Hatt’s paintings of Sápmi, over a dozen of
which are now on display at a new exhibit at the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm.
I’d been interested in this artist, writer, and ethnographer for a couple of
years by then and had begun researching her life. I’d also sought out what I
could of her artwork.
Mette Dyrberg at the Skive Art
Museum in Denmark was one of the first to welcome me to the world of this
relatively unknown artist. This museum, near where Demant Hatt (1873-1958) had grown up by
the Limfjord, had been given a number of oil paintings from Demant Hatt’s own
collection, as well as watercolors and sketchbooks. I
understood from an illustrated catalog, published in 1983 by the Skive Art
Museum, that Demant Hatt’s style changed radically in the mid-1920s and that
most of the finely painted but more realistic work owned by Skive didn’t always
represent her mature, Expressionist style, which was more dramatic and whose
subject was often landscapes of the far north. Some of these Sápmi landscapes,
privately owned in Denmark, were reproduced in the catalog. Others were said to
belong to the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm.
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| Nordiska Museet, Stockholm |
The story went that, near the end
of her life, finding no public institution in Denmark that would take her many paintings
of Sápmi, Demant Hatt sent around fifty of them to the relatively new “Lapp
Department” of Nordiska Museet. I was tantalized by the thought of those paintings
which, according to all accounts, had only been displayed once at the Swedish
museum, in 1953, along with those of six other Swedish painters who also used
Sápmi as a motif. After this exhibit the
paintings went into storage and there, apparently, they’d remained ever since.
The Nordiska has Sweden’s largest
collection of Swedish cultural-historical artifacts. Designed to look like a
Danish Renaissance palace, one of the museum’s most striking features is the
massive interior hall, with a marble floor and many marble columns. It was
finished in 1907, the same year that Emilie Demant Hatt began her long stay
among the Swedish Sami at Lake Tornesträsk. Artur Hazelius, its founder, began
collecting everything to do with Sweden’s pre-industrial, vanishing culture—from
handmade furniture to folk art, from regional dress to actual buildings––back
in the 1870s. The popular open-air museum near the Nordiska, Skansen, is where
many of the buildings were reassembled.
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| The Sami Exhibit, Lapparna, opened 1947. Nordiska Museet |
Before the Nordiska was built,
Hazelius had displayed some of his treasures in the Scandinavian Ethnographic
Collection in the city center. This included many objects from Sápmi—sleds,
tents, and all things to do with reindeer, as well as domestic utensils and sacred
drums. The Sami collection has had a long, fascinating, and sometimes contentious
history at the Nordiska, with the permanent Sami exhibits reflecting the
fashions and prejudices of the time. The current exhibit is short on objects
and uses more multimedia to allow the Sami themselves to speak about their
varied lives and memories. Some of the Nordiska’s artifacts have been
transferred to Áttje, the Sami museum in
Jokkmokk, Sweden.
In 1939 the anthropologist,
journalist, and photographer Ernst Manker became the director of the museum’s first
attempt at a more scholarly and organized “Lapp Department. ” A strong
proponent of the Sami, Manker wrote a number of books about the herding culture,
edited an academic imprint, Acta Lapponia, continued to collect artefacts, and
rearranged the Sami permanent exhibit into what was, for the time, a more
progressive display. Manker invited Emilie
Demant Hatt to Stockholm in 1940 to receive the Hazelius Award for her work
with the Sami and particularly for her collaborative translation of Muitalus sámiid birra/An Account of the Sami
by Johan Turi. The original event, an ambitious “Lappish Evening” at the
museum, which would include a speech by Demant Hatt, was scheduled for April of
1940—but had to be postponed, when the Germans invaded Denmark. Later that
year Emilie Demant Hatt did manage to get to the Nordiska, to give a much
admired speech in praise of Johan Turi. Karl Tirén, who had collected Sami
joiks on wax cylinders early in the century, and Israel Ruong, a Sami
ethnographer and linguist, who was also a joiker, appeared with her that
evening.
From this evening, a friendship
between Manker and Demant Hatt grew up, and it was Manker who invited her to
donate photographs, unpublished manuscripts, letters, and field notebooks about
her Sami ethnography to the Nordiska. He also welcomed the gift of the
paintings, though the Nordiska was not properly an art museum, but one of
cultural history. The paintings, while preserved as part of the substantial
Sami collection at the museum, were likely destined never to be exhibited after
that first show in 1953.
Some ten years ago, I was doing
some journalism and working on my book The
Palace of the Snow Queen and had various occasions to be in Stockholm. I
decided to see if one of the curators at the Nordiska would let me have a look
at Demant Hatt’s paintings. I was invited to meet an art curator, Maria Maxen,
at the entrance hall; she led me downstairs and along a corridor. Through the
doors of cage-like storage rooms I glimpsed swords and pewter tankards and
painted chairs, multitudes of objects from Swedish culture that had come to
rest here. One of these small storage rooms held the paintings of Emilie Demant
Hatt. They were upright in storage shelves and we took them out one by one and
leaned them against the walls and shelving so that I could take digital
photographs.
I loved the paintings from the
start. They were much larger than I expected, most of them, and the colors hadn’t
faded, but glowed through a light dust of time in hues of vivid scarlet, warm
topaz, and an icy northern palette of blues and grays and greens. I tried to
grasp the immensity of what I was seeing: over fifty landscapes of jagged
mountains with the swirling Northern Lights behind and women in red koftes boating around a deep blue,
glacier-powdered mountain lake. Firelight spilled like molten lava from tents
shaped like small brown volcanos and reindeer herders stood around bonfires
warming their hands during a coffee break in the middle of a vast winter
wilderness. Reindeer trudged over ice bridges and grazed in the midst of
snowfields. And in many paintings were small scruffy dogs, sometimes staring up
at the sky, witnesses and working companions.
Later I was glad I had spent more
time photographing than simply staring, open-mouthed, at the unexpected riches
in storage. The digital pictures I took that day have long been friends to me
and I’ve called them up regularly on my computer screen to admire them and to
describe them in my writing about Demant Hatt.
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| Emilie Demant Hatt, 1910 |
On February 6, the Nordiska
opened an exhibit titled Minnen av
Lapland, “The Memory of Lapland,” which shows fifteen of these paintings. I’m
honored that I’ve been asked to come to Stockholm and speak at the museum March19 about Emilie Demant Hatt’s life as an artist and ethnographer among the Sami
of northern Sweden. My old friend Hugh Beach, a professor of anthropology at
the University of Uppsala, will introduce me and say a few words in Swedish
about Demant Hatt’s importance as an early woman anthropologist, and curator
Cecilia Hammarslund-Larsen will speak about the exhibit. I’ll show slides, too,
and give thanks. It is always an occasion for joy and gratitude when something
you wish for—in my case the chance for a larger public to see some these
marvelous, vivid paintings—actually comes true.
Most of the links in this post are to Swedish language sites, but Google Translate (on the Nordiska's site) will give an approximation of the content. A version of this blog post,
along with more reproductions of Emilie Demant Hatt’s art, appears on the
website emiliedemanthatt.com.
I’ll also be giving a talk about
Emilie Demant Hatt at Kvinfo, the women’s library, in Copenhagen, March 24. Both my talks will include slides of Demant Hatt's photographs and paintings.
“The Art of Recalling,” an
article about the influence of Johan Turi and Sápmi on Emilie Demant Hatt’s art
will appear in Feminist Studies, summer
2014.
