Júlíana Sveinsdóttir

Biography

“I have always wanted to bring my works back home and defend myself,” Júlíana Sveinsdóttir wrote. What she had to defend was her absence: she left Iceland young and never settled there again, though she always thought of returning.

She was born on 31 July 1889 in the Westman Islands, off the southern coast of Iceland, the second of five sisters in the family of Guðrún Runólfsdóttir and Sveinn Jónsson. At sixteen she moved to Reykjavik and studied there for two years. Her interest in art had been sparked at school, and by the age of twenty she was taking lessons from Þórarinn B. Þorláksson, one of the best-known Icelandic artists of the twentieth century. She then went to Copenhagen, where she attended several private drawing schools and finally entered the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1917. Denmark became her home, with the exception of a short period in the late 1920s. She spent her summers in Iceland, and Icelandic landscapes remained the main subject of her painting. She also painted still lifes and portraits, but it was her landscapes that drew the critics’ attention and won awards. In 1947 the Eckersberg Medal of the Royal Danish Academy was awarded to one of them. She is regarded as having considerably renewed the approach to the landscape motif, and its colour, in the 1930s to 1950s. I think this is better judged from the canvases themselves than from the wording of reference books: in museum collections they can be compared with the work of her Danish contemporaries.

Her recognition went hand in hand with the gradual acceptance of women in the European art world. She was an early member (though not a founder) of the Danish Female Artists’ Society and sat on its board from 1935 to 1949. The society pressed for more women on decision-making bodies and easier access to grants, and it gave women artists a network of contacts. Júlíana benefited from all of this. From 1941 to 1949 she sat on the board of the Charlottenborg Exhibition, and in 1955 she was elected to the board of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts; when the society was founded, neither body had any women members. In 1946 she received the Tagea Brandt travel stipend.

Textiles formed a separate part of her work. In Copenhagen she designed abstract rugs, and one of them won the gold medal at the Triennale in Milan in 1951: the first design award an Icelander had won at an international exhibition. Later the Danish State Art Fund commissioned a rug from her for the court chamber of the Supreme Court in Copenhagen. In Iceland her textiles went largely unnoticed for decades, since only her paintings were written about and reviewed; their importance was recognised only in the 1950s, after the Milan award.

She died in Copenhagen on 17 April 1966. In 2008, after the first flyby of Mercury by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft, one of the newly discovered craters was named after her. In 2015 the Reykjavík Art Museum showed separate exhibitions of her paintings and her textiles.