GEORGES VON SWETLIK WAS A EUROPEAN ARTIST IN FINLAND

Georges von Swetlik spent most of his life and career in Finland, creating an extensive and partly pioneering artistic heritage. Born in St. Petersburg in 1912, he fled the Russian Revolution and spent much of his childhood on the Russian Black Sea Coast and in Constantinople before the von Swetlik family finally settled in Helsinki in 1923. The von Swetliks were descendants of an ancient Bohemian feudal clan, and the young man was raised in surroundings that combined Russian, international and Swedish-speaking Finnish influences. This Russian background led to difficulties after the Second World War, and though keen to emigrate to the USA, von Swetlik only reached Sweden before gravitating back to Finland by force of circumstances in the early 1950s. It was here that he lived out the rest of his days, initially in Helsinki and subsequently in nearby Western Uusimaa.
A precocious artist, he began painting as a teenager in the 1920s with an early interest in Russian realism soon giving way to classical European art. Though two leading painters, the Russian Ilya Repin and the Finnish Akseli Gallen-Kallela, were willing to admit von Swetlik to their master classes, neither of these artists lived to see his offer taken up. Both had forecast a brilliant career for the young man. With support from the industrialist and patron of the arts Gösta Serlachius in the 1930s, von Swetlik gained a reputation as a skilled portraitist. Serlachius also sent him to Paris, where he sought to hone his skills by copying classic works on display at the Louvre, thereby enlisting Rembrandt, Titian and Velasquez as his de facto teachers. This classical period in von Swetlik’s artistic development was followed by an encounter with impressionism.
The various stages of his career carried von Swetlik through the history of art in an unusually systematic way. In the spirit of the time he only painted once during the abstract period in 1950s, and instead this became a stage of technical and artistic preparation for a new way of painting that he would make entirely his own. At the end of this decade he devoted himself to a unique style of figure painting that sought thematic axioms in antiquity and classical literature. He painted in virtuoso style, idiosyncratically applying an egg tempera technique and working like a composer through countless possible variations of compositional opportunity and colour schemes to realise a distinctive touch, tone and illuminating mystique. Notwithstanding the Biblical theme of the wise and foolish virgins, his goals remained artistic with light, man and rhythm combining to bring forth a musical entity. His Byzantine series treats icon subjects, seeking an impression of fresco technique. Commenting on a French exhibition of von Swetlik’s work in 1967, the artist André Verdet observed that “far from contemporary aspirations and discoveries, von Swetlik takes his dream to the extreme. The tradition that he maintains lives on.”

Though long making a living through portrait painting, from the 1970s onwards, von Swetlik may have gradually begun to base his livelihood on other works as well. Private collections were expanding and becoming more common, and his real breakthrough in Finland came quite late in 1989-1990 following exhibitions at Ekenäs Museum and at Hagelstam Gallery in Helsinki. Georges von Swetlik received a State artist’s pension towards the end of his life and died in Ekenäs on the south coast of Finland in 1991.

Georges von Swetlik was described as a “great Russian master” at a 2007 exhibition in Moscow, and centenary exhibitions of his work arranged in Helsinki, Tenhola and the Åland Islands Art Museum in 2012 also attracted great interest. His works are prominently displayed in the Serlachius collection in Mänttä, and have also changed hands at art auctions in recent years.

Georges von Swetlik created his art outside of the Finnish national programme and far from the sources of his own classical inspiration, but despite this – or perhaps precisely because of it – he may have managed to combine European and Eastern cultural influences more effectively than any other artist into a synthesis that earns him a unique place in the history of art.

Riggert Munsterhjelm
Artist, PhD
Student of Georges von Swetlik