GUEST LECTURE & BOOK SIGNING
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
5:00 pm in Cole Studio
South Entrance, 84 Lyme Street, Old Lyme
Dita Amory studied art history at Trinity College, Sarah Lawrence College, and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she earned a master’s degree. From 1978 to 1982, she was librarian to Rachel Mellon at the Oak Spring Garden Library in Upperville, Virginia. From 1983 to 1996, she was Curator of Drawings, then Chief Curator at the National Academy of Design in New York. She joined the Met in 1997 as Assistant Curator of the Robert Lehman Collection, taking charge of the department in 2007 as Acting Associate Curator in Charge, and later assumed the endowed title of Robert Lehman Curator in Charge.
Amory organized numerous departmental and interdepartmental exhibitions in her first years at the Met. Among these, she profiled master drawings from the Robert Lehman Collection. In recent years, with a particular interest in Post-Impressionism and Modernism, she curated and wrote exhibition catalogues for Pierre Bonnard: the Late Still Lifes, Madame Cézanne, a survey of the work of Félix Vallotton, and, more recently, Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism. This season, Dita has introduced a Nordic modernist, Helene Schjerfbeck, the subject of her lecture.
Amory serves on the Board of Directors of the Robert Lehman Foundation and the New York Studio School.
