Sigrid Hjerten
Sigrid Hjerten was a Swedish painter of the modernist school who studied with Henri Matisse in Paris beginning in 1909, adapting her use of color as a means of expression. She tried to use both color and form as her means of expressing her emotions on canvas. In 1912 she returned to Sweden and began presenting her work in exhibitions there and throughout Europe. By the beginning of the 1920s, she was well known in Europe as a painter who was radically different for the time in her work. She moved with her husband, also an artist, and children to Paris where she endured his philandering and continued to work.
From 1920 until 1932 Sigrid lived in Paris with her family. She traveled extensively, to the Mediterranean coast of Italy and to various locales in France, to find subjects for her to paint, Her husband, a painter of some repute, made frequent trips back to Stockholm to exhibit his work, but Sigrid, while productive, showed little inclination to exhibit her own. Instead, she began to exhibit various symptoms of illness which were usually of a psychosomatic nature, often in response to her husband’s absences.
In 1932 she decided to leave Paris and return to Stockholm to work and live. While preparing to leave she suffered a breakdown and mental collapse. When she arrived in Sweden she was sent for a time to an asylum where she exhibited symptoms of depression. She recovered for a while and returned to her work but required periodic stays at the mental hospital over the next four years. Her husband left her and they divorced. She received acclaim from the art world and critics for an exhibition which she presented in Stockholm in 1936, but she stopped painting that year.
Her repeated bouts of depression led her to Beckomberg Psychiatric Hospital following a complete breakdown later that year and she was diagnosed as schizophrenic and remained in the hospital. She underwent the treatments of the day, including shock therapy, which had little effect on her illness. Now permanently hospitalized and increasingly ill, Sigrid had little interest in painting or being involved in any other type of therapy. Meanwhile, her doctors were stressing the effectiveness of lobotomy, which was performed at a high rate per capita in the Scandinavian countries.
Whether Sigrid underwent a lobotomy voluntarily or it was forced upon her by doctors at the hospital is uncertain, but she had a prefrontal lobotomy performed in 1948. She died as a result of the operation. Between 1944 and 1966, more than 4,500 lobotomies were performed in Sweden alone, with the majority of them performed on women. Many of them were ordered by medical professionals on those who could not make decisions regarding their care.