Guest Lecture & Book Signing with MET Curator Dita Amory
An Introduction to Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck—a guest lecture and book signing with MET Curator Dita Amory
Join us on Friday, February 27, 2026, at 5:00 pm for “An Introduction to Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck”, a guest lecture and book signing with Dita Amory, Robert Lehman Curator in Charge at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This lecture, presented by Metropolitan Museum of Art Curator Dita Amory, will introduce the Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946). Renowned throughout Finland, she is little known in the US. The Metropolitan Museum is the first major US museum to present her work. The exhibition of paintings was designed to present passages in the life of the artist, tracing a remarkable career from her Paris training in naturalism to her growing abstraction in later years. In addition to developing her own brand of modernism, Schjerfbeck grew increasingly preoccupied with her materials and their application on canvas. She began adding and subtracting layers of paint using a palette knife and stylus. Often, her scraping left open canvas weave, a visual trope seen in much of her later work. Schjerfbeck’s career spanned nearly 70 years; she did not stop painting until her dying days. The final self-portraits chronicling her physical decline stand among the most remarkable self-studies seen anywhere in the history of art.
$30 — Lecture
$65 — Lecture plus purchase of Dita Amory’s book Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck
$45 — Purchase of Dita Amory’s book Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck
