The Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck told her models to stay silent and look away from her while she worked. She would not tolerate conversation or a returned gaze. As a result her paintings show the many ways art can present a person indirectly: in profile, eyes closed, staring off in the distance or looking askance, absorbed in reading, thinking, or domestic tasks.

Deflecting subjectivity is considerably more difficult when depicting oneself, and Schjerfbeck made many self-portraits throughout her career. How do you catch yourself looking away? And if you manage it, using multiple mirrors, what do you reveal? In a late drawing, Self-Portrait in Profile (circa 1933), the artist adopts a turned-away posture, leaving her reflection an unknowable exterior. A diagonal line in the lower-left corner shoots out of frame, marking the edge of her easel and signaling her attention’s direction. To follow it, as the composition invites, we have to slide past her toward the unseen object of her stare: her work, this work. We look away, caught in the space between the artist and her art.

Schjerfbeck was born in Helsinki in 1862 and discovered her talent early. Left with a permanent limp after a fall at age four, she drew with pencils and crayons throughout her convalescence. By age eleven she was considered a prodigy, accepted to the Drawing School of the Finnish Art Society on scholarship. There she distinguished herself quickly, receiving several prizes for her work. A fellow student, Helena Westermarck, became a close friend, one of several “painter sisters” she met as a student. They studied in Paris together in the early 1880s, first in a women’s painting studio and then at the coed Académie Colarossi.

The Paris Salon and trips to Brittany furthered their education in academic and avant-garde French art, but Westermarck stopped painting when she contracted tuberculosis in 1884. Schjerfbeck’s portrait of her from that year, wearing a painter’s smock, is one of her most affecting. Westermarck’s mouth falls opens in absorption, her brow crinkling behind her pince-nez. Schjerfbeck’s self-portrait from the same period is likewise all focus, no vanity, with one eye directly engaging the viewer and the other skewing to the side. She faces us, unlike Westermarck, but only half of her face meets our gaze. By harmonizing her honey-blonde hair with the background and her smock, she makes her ivory skin, pink cheeks, and blue-gray eyes pop. The torque of her neck and the difference between the two sides of her face—besides the exotropic eyes, one cheek is more flushed, one side of the mouth fuller, darker, more defined—make her appear evasive and assertive at once.

Schjerfbeck is best known for her self-portraits, but she was also an inventive painter of other people, landscapes, still lifes, and interiors. An expert at surface textures and light effects, she also had an eye for abstract form even in her early naturalistic works. Clothes Drying is a landscape of laundry, an oblique view of a small stretch of lawn strewn with linens of a hard-to-determine scale. Tufts of grass and sticks look like trees, overlapping sheets like the roofs of a town. The fascination of the picture is the juxtaposition of two-dimensional shapes rendered in loose strokes with finely painted flowers, plants, and dirt. Critics found it baffling.

Strong shapes and vivid brushwork also animate The Door, depicting a shadowy corner of a gothic chapel in Brittany. Schjerfbeck draws a rainbow of color—blue, green, yellow, pink, and red—from a white wall, a brown floor, and a black door. The slivers of sunlight shining through the edges of this forbidding portal—the inverse of the window featured in so many late nineteenth-century Nordic interiors—give threshold and lintel a psychological charge and softly illuminate the scuffs on the floor. It is a severe composition filled with sensuous pleasure: the rust-colored paint dripping down the wall and the grays, blacks, and blues swirling over the floorboards seem more about playing with color and texture than about recording a place.

Schjerfbeck was remarkably independent as a young woman, traveling freely with and without her “painter sisters.” She never married or had children; with no financial cushion from her family, she had to live off her art. Although she eventually had a dealer who represented her in Helsinki and Stockholm, and a friend who published her first biography when she was fifty-five, she orchestrated her own career and was uncompromising in her self-presentation, refusing to participate in exhibitions that did not reflect her current aesthetic commitments.

It helped that her life coincided with first-wave feminism in Europe. Nordic women faced the same forms of sexism and limited opportunities as their European and American counterparts, but many of them had more success, due in part to quicker political and institutional support. In 1879 the Finnish Art Society awarded all of its prizes to women, and by 1890 there were more female than male students in its school. Finland was the first European country to give women the right to vote and the first country in the world to give them the right to stand for elections, both in 1906. In 1905, when the suffrage debate was raging, Schjerfbeck participated in a nationally sponsored exhibition of women artists in Helsinki. Such a thing would not happen in France until 1937 (and Schjerfbeck participated in that exhibition, too).

Finland was especially keen to support artists, male or female, as sources of national pride. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century the country was under Russian control, and Schjerfbeck grew up amid an independence movement that increasingly used art to promote national identity. Over the course of her youth, a nation with no museums and few opportunities for artistic instruction established art schools for men and women, began sponsoring exhibitions of contemporary art, and purchased homegrown art from these exhibitions to build the Ateneum, still Finland’s most important art museum. To give this budding national collection a historical foundation and to help fill the walls, the government paid Schjerfbeck and other Finnish artists to travel through Europe and copy Old Master paintings. Between 1892 and 1894 she went to Saint Petersburg, Vienna, and Florence to paint works by Hals, Holbein, ter Borch, Velázquez, Fra Angelico, Lippi, and Giorgione. These commissions were a capstone to her education and a testament to her expansive technical skill.

After her travels Schjerfbeck spent six years teaching painting and drawing in Helsinki before settling in Hyvinkää, a quiet railroad junction north of the city, in order to focus more deeply on her work and take care of her mother. As her career progressed, she let go of the naturalistic detail that came so easily in her youth and sought out new materials and techniques. She wrote to a friend: “Let us avoid executing so precisely and exactly that our work closes the way instead of opening it. Let us imply.”

Loosening and ambiguating her technique was another way of capturing her subjects indirectly, an approach that refused an over-determined finish or meaning. It is not uncommon for art prodigies to turn against their talent, rejecting verisimilitude for the challenge of radical methods and styles. Schjerfbeck made this turn to keep her work open, as if ever in progress.

She especially admired the “dead tone” of Degas’s pastels, which he reportedly achieved by bleaching his pastel sticks in the sun and steaming his works with boiling water, perhaps to saturate their blunted hues. Degas’s continual innovations were a model; she envisioned her work as similarly experimental and aggressive. Describing color like an enemy she needed to subdue, she told another friend: “I too must kill the tone before it acquires strength, pure color is nothing but raw and weak to me.”

Another technique inspired by Degas (and Manet and Morisot) was painting in multiple layers with sgraffito, a subtractive process using a flat blade or stylus to scrape and rub the topmost layer, revealing those below. Westermarck called the technique “ruthless.” Schjerfbeck herself found a portrait of her landlady (The Lace Shawl, 1920) “too furious,” even though she had set out to make “a harsh painting with a strong expression.” Technical analysis by the conservators Charlotte Hale and Silvia A. Centeno shows how vigorously she scratched, scraped, and rubbed the surface, creating a textural analogue to the woman’s gaunt, teeth-grinding expression.

The Lace Shawl, acquired by the Met in 2023, was the first Schjerfbeck to enter an American museum collection. “Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck” is, in part, an excuse to show it off, but it does much more, offering a powerful introduction to a singular artist virtually unknown in the United States. Schjerfbeck is a superstar in her home country, often sharing the honor of most important Finnish artist with her more nationalist contemporary, Akseli Gallen-Kallela. Best known for his popular illustrations of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, Gallen-Kallela lived in the US for a few years and is now represented by a major work in the Art Institute of Chicago. Schjerfbeck stayed in Europe, and almost all of her paintings remain in Finland and Sweden, but the Ateneum loans them generously, and international demand for her work—and for Nordic modernism more broadly—is on the rise.

The past eighteen months have seen the Swede Hilma af Klint at MoMA; the Norwegians Harriet Backer and Christian Krohg at the Musée d’Orsay; the Dane Anna Ancher at the Dulwich Picture Gallery; and another Dane, Vilhelm Hammershøi, now at the Thyssen Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. “Nordic Noir: Works on Paper from Edvard Munch to Mamma Andersson” just closed at the British Museum, and a major af Klint retrospective opens soon at the Grand Palais. In 2027 American audiences will get to enjoy Hammershøi’s paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Frick. Schjerfbeck knew Hammershøi’s work, its uncanny silence and indirection. In Self-Portrait at Spurveskjul (1911), in the Met’s collection, his self-confronting stare is almost occluded by shadow.

Curated with a judicious eye by Dita Amory, the Met’s exhibition highlights crucial periods and genres of Schjerfbeck’s career. Tighter than a retrospective, with less than sixty paintings to see, the selection allows viewers to meet the psychological demands of Schjerfbeck’s art without glazing over in exhaustion, giving adequate time to the work’s varied textures and luminosities. The show moves rapidly through the artist’s trajectory from a young phenomenon dazzling viewers with naturalist detail to an internationally respected modernist exploring new ways to merge figuration and abstraction.

Like the recent exhibitions in New York, Paris, London, and Madrid, this one challenges the idea of the Nordic artist as isolated and out-of-step with avant-garde movements. This is almost always a blinkered stereotype, and certainly so in Schjerfbeck’s case: even after her youthful travels, when working in Hyvinkää, she stayed up to speed on cosmopolitan culture through correspondence with friends, art books, and fashion magazines. She had some of the latest fashions shipped to her from Paris, and when making her own clothes she copied French trends. Although her life at home was circumscribed and modest, she continued to participate in exhibitions throughout Finland, Sweden, Norway, Russia, and Germany.

Amory and her coauthors in the catalogue also challenge the mythology surrounding Schjerfbeck as a frail neurasthenic cowering from the world, arguing for her resilience, tenacity, and independence as both artist and woman. I believe it, but I think the cowering is important, too, even if only as a look the artist puts on in her paintings. A trope that they develop is the difficulty—even the terror—of confronting the self, especially in the decline of midlife and old age.

Not a happy subject, but she had a mordant sense of humor about it. “I am looking at a book on artists’ self-portraits,” she wrote. “Those who have made themselves more beautiful are boring.” Instead of more beautiful, how about more angst-ridden? (She must have known Courbet’s early self-portraits, which do both.) In Self-Portrait (1912) and Self-Portrait with Silver Background (1915) Schjerfbeck stares past us with a hunted look, as if watching something creep up on us from behind. In these and other self-depictions, including a photograph from circa 1895, she performs steely dread, as if summoning an invisible threat. Her look, again, is indirect: face turned in three-quarter profile, irises obscured by smudges of paint or skimming past the viewer.

This defensive expression tips into camp in three self-portraits from the 1930s. Here she is pulling faces, eyebrows arching as high as they’ll go, the whites of her eyes stretched, rolling, cartoonish. Her mugging undercuts the horror of the last self-portraits painted during World War II, spectral images of the artist wasting away into a flayed skin. Devotees will find this sacrilegious, but I have a hard time taking them wholly seriously. Their extremity reads like gallows humor, whether or not she is in on the joke.

In her best self-portraits, Schjerfbeck’s trepidation is defiant and controlled, on the edge of anger. Her sharp chin and high-collared jacket anchor her in an abstract background; her jawbone and darting eyes slice through the picture plane at contrary angles; an ear, scraped to a blur, aims its cavity at us as if to say “tell me your worst.” In these pictures the silence of her painting is more than the muteness of a visual medium. She doubles down on it by painting her lips pursed.