92. ESTER HENNING. Boulders and trees, crayon on paper, 26 x 33 cm.

ESTER HENING 1887-1985 "Boulders and trees" Stamp signed E H. Crayon on paper, 26 x 33 cm.

Ester Henning - a poignant destiny and an indomitable creative force that defied a lifelong existence in a degrading mental hospital environment and created some of the most touching in Swedish 20th century art.

Ester Henning's fate is undeniably one of the most poignant in Swedish art history. She was born on 28 October 1887 in Yngshyttan, north of Filipstad, as the daughter of shoemaker Carl Johan Henning and his wife Lovisa. The couple had a total of eight children and lived in very small circumstances. After four years in public school, Ester was sent to Mora, where she had to start "her career as a servant to strangers", to use the artist's own words, already at the age of 12-13. Her aptitude for drawing was noticed and encouraged by a matron in one of the homes where she worked. From 1900 to 1911 Ester lived in Mora and there has been much speculation about the influence that Zorn may have had on her artistic dreams.

In 1911, she went to Stockholm, where various jobs were interspersed with four semesters of sporadic studies at the Technical School. During her studies, she had shown the greatest interest in figure modeling and it was also within this art form that Ester was noticed in an article in Idun in 1915 with the title "From automatic dishwasher to sculpture rice. Ester Henning and her art". The article shows the great hardships she had to endure at the various workplaces. However, the situation would become even worse. Unemployed and poor, Ester is arrested on 17 April 1916 at Riddarhustorget for "violence committed against Constable Jansson". The following day she is taken to Katarina hospital "for mental illness", as stated in the police report. After five weeks she was discharged as healthy, but with the diagnosis of Dementia praecox, what we call schizophrenia today. Three years later she had to be admitted to a mental hospital again, this time at Säter's hospital. Ester had then had delusions that her parents were trying to hypnotize her to "become weird" and as a result she had cut the electrical wires in her parents' house and hit her mother in the head with a frying pan.

During the first three or four years at Säter, Ester Henning continued her artistic creation, but then her condition worsened markedly, she fought, was "capricious" and "loose" and ran around naked. After six years at Säter, she ends up at Uppsala Hospital, which had previously seen names such as Gustaf Fröding and Ernst Josephson among its patients. She then spends a few years at Långbro. When the newly built Beckomberga - one of Europe's largest mental hospitals, with room for over 1,600 patients - opens in 1932, Ester is moved there. She is then autistic and periodically also mutistic. Ester Henning first ends up in a ward for "lazy and unattractive", but after a while she is transferred to a chronicler ward, ward 22. In the ward there was a monitoring room with eight beds and this gloomy environment would become Ester Henning's home for over 40 years.

The strange thing happens, however, that this broken-down woman, in an anything but inspiring prison environment, will create art that belongs to our country's most fascinating and poignant. Everything happens thanks to the curator Janny-Lisa Clason, who when she was hired at Beckomberga in 1936 was told by the staff about how Ester had tried to draw with a piece of charcoal on toilet paper and how she had mashed flower petals between her fingers and drawn with the plant mass on the underside of the chair seats. The far-sighted curator makes sure that Ester gets crayons and paper. This provides the conditions for the artist to really start creating.

For obvious reasons, Ester Henning's world of motifs is limited to the environment that existed within the walls of the hospital. A large part of her production depicts views of Beckomberga's barracks-like pavilions. Sitting in bed, she captured these environments, which she could see through the bedroom window. The occasional floral motif also appears. A significant circle of motifs is her depictions of her fellow patients. Most of the portraits were added without the model's knowledge. Ester used to sit in a corner of the day room and for a long time observe and study the other patients, and then with her crayons hastily attach someone's features to the paper. The portraits were often a fusion of current characteristics and memory remnants from previous encounters with the depicted. Not least, there is an impression of the artist's own emotional state in these works. For Ester, the portraits meant something other than depiction. She had a special magical relationship with the images and initially she watched over them and did not allow outsiders to either see or acquire them.

The artist's fast and expressive way of working gives the portraits a striking nerve. They almost seem to vibrate with a life force, which overturns the usual image of mental patients as broken down to body and soul. Perhaps Ester saw her own indomitable power in her fellow patients as well, or she had it transferred to them in the portraits.

Many of Ester Henning's motifs are executed with dense bursts of lines and these images provide clear associations to the feverish paintings that Sigrid Hjertén created during her last active years. One of Ester's fellow patients in ward 22 at Beckomberga was precisely Sigrid Hjertén. She was admitted to Beckomberga in stages from 1936 until she died in the aftermath of a failed lobotomy in 1948. The relationship between the two artists was strained. Sigrid, who did not paint during this period, found it difficult to accept that others were engaged in painting and Ester was not slow to defend herself. "The ladies were at war with each other" so that for a time they had to be separated. Isaac Grünewald demanded that Sigrid be allowed to stay in the ward and Ester was therefore forced to stay in another ward for a while. Despite all the antagonism, Sigrid Hjertén took an interest in Ester's art and mainly in the portraits. Sigrid's comments, which were written down by a medical assistant deeply involved in Ester's artistry, were – although positive – usually quite toxic. "You can look at it without vomiting" was the review of one of the portraits.

Ester Henning's artistry would reach a larger audience than the hospital staff and Sigrid Hjertén. In May 1946, the exhibition "Schizophrenic Art" was organized in Gothenburg. The person who had the most works in the exhibition was Ester. Among the other artists were names such as Carl Fredrik Hill and Ernst Josephson. On the day of the opening, one of Ester's portraits was depicted on the front page of Göteborgs-Tidningen and she consistently received very good criticism from the reviewers. Illustrative of the interest in the exhibition was that it was rewritten as much as the large van Gogh exhibition that was going on at the same time.

After being locked up in ward 22 at Beckomberga for 15 years, Ester was released, which meant an opportunity to leave the ward on her own. She had then been locked up for a total of 28 years in various mental hospitals. Three years later, she received a pass and thus permission to leave the hospital grounds. With the newfound freedom, she explored nature and picked flowers, which she could then paint. Her favorite motif, however, was the machinist's cabin on the hospital grounds, which she painted about fifty times, always in different color schemes.

Ester Henning experienced an even greater sense of freedom in 1969 when she was moved from Beckomberga to Bolmängen's nursing home in Flen, a small private nursing home with only 20 guests. For the first time in her life, the now 80-year-old Ester got her own room. From her window she could see a wooded hill with two large boulders, a motif she depicted several times. The three years she spent in Flen were an artistically very productive period. This period also coincided with another public appearance. In 1970, a large presentation of her work was given when the Association of Swedish Artists organized an anniversary exhibition at Liljevalchs, where Ester Henning participated as a special invitee with no less than 175 works that filled the largest hall at Liljevalchs. The director of the nursing home drove Ester to Stockholm and Liljevalchs, where a small reception committee including Janny-Lisa Clason was waiting. However, Ester initially refused to enter Liljevalchs. Instead, she sat for a couple of hours on the steps outside. When she finally entered the art gallery, she first looked closely at all the other artists' works and said they were beautiful, after which she entered the main exhibition hall, where her own works were hanging. She crept carefully along the walls and didn't say a word. The tears just flowed.

After three years in Flen, however, the relative freedom was over. Over the years, Ester had become quite heavy and immobile, and when her immobility increased more and more, she could finally no longer stay at the private nursing home. Instead, she had to return to life in Ward 22 at Beckomberga.

Ester Henning spent her last seven years as a long-term care patient at Solberga Hospital in Älvsjö, outside Stockholm. She was now both blind and deaf and also unable to rise from the cot, which somehow became the ultimate symbol of the confinement to which she had been subjected for most of her life. On May 1, 1985, Ester Hening died at the age of 97 and she was buried in the family grave at Mora's new cemetery. She had finally been allowed to come home.

Source: Irja Bergström "Ester Henning – Kvinnoöde, Konstnärsdröm, Anstaltsliv" (Carlssons Bokförlag, 2001) The National Museum owns a large collection of Ester Henning's colored crayon drawings and the Moderna Museet has her portrait of Sigrid Hjertén in colored crayons, she is also represented at the National Art Council and at the Värmland museum.
Ester Henning's artistry has continued to fascinate new generations. In 2001 her art was shown at Bror Hjorths Hus in Uppsala and the same year Irja Bergström's book about the artist "Ester Henning – Kvinnoöde, Konstnärsdröm, Anstaltsliv" (Carlsson Bokförlag, 2001) came out. Maud Nycander's TV documentary about Ester Henning, "Konstnärinnan på avd. 22" (2009) has meant a deepened interest, as has Anna Jörgensdotter's novel "Drömmen om Ester" (Albert Bonniers förlag, 2015).

Supplementary images: 1. Ester Henning in Idun 1915 (Irja Bergström "Ester Henning – Kvinnoöde, Konstnärsdröm, Anstaltsliv") 2. Ester Henning patient photography Seats 1926 (Irja Bergström "Ester Henning – Female fate, Artist's dream, Institutional life") 3. Beckomberga Hospital 1930s (Stockholm City Museum) 4. Sigrid Hjertén on Beckomberga crayon by Ester Henning 1941 (Moderna Museet) 5. Ester Henning and curator Janny-Lisa Clason 1946 (Irja Bergström "Ester Henning – Women's Desire, Artist's Dream, Institutional Life").