黑料不打烊

One of the best things I’ve done for myself was to keep a gratitude journal. It was my New Year’s resolution for 2021, the only one I’ve ever kept – and, as it turned out, one I would sorely need. From January to December, I veered off the academic career path I’d planned for decades, graduated from college, found my first full-time job, moved several hours away, and immediately regretted it. Thankfully, it all ended up alright (though I can’t say things have settled down yet), but it was quite the chaotic entry into adult life. 

True to my word, even on the worst days of the drizzly, dark St. Louis winter, facing down loneliness and professional confusion, I managed to scribble down one thing I was grateful for at the end of the night. And then, on January 1, 2022, having dutifully completed my new habit, I stopped. I’ve only sporadically been able to pick it up again since.

Harriet Backer, By Lamp Light, 1890

Still, if you’ve ever heard anyone say that practicing gratitude (or any other mindfulness or therapeutic technique) can “rewire the brain,” I can attest that it does happen. By the end of the year, I noticed more. When people were kind to me, I appreciated it more. When I got back to my room after a particularly tough day, I felt its coziness more. When I let myself make a post-gym pilgrimage to the drive-thru line at Panda Express (as I said, it was a trying time), I almost achieved a sense of nostalgia in advance. Sometimes, all I could think of to be grateful for was my bed and my (increasingly precarious) health. But I was thankful for them.

I’ve had similar experiences learning to draw, sculpt, and, most recently, take dubious pictures with my iPhone. My aesthetic tastes have expanded. I have a greater capacity to appreciate beauty in objects, places, and people. It’s next to impossible to draw anyone’s face without developing an appreciation for it. Though I wouldn’t assert that all of our preferences are shaped by environment and culture, I do believe that we can train ourselves to love beauty wherever we find it.

Harriet Backer, The Library of Thorvald Boeck, 1902

This sentiment is not absent from the contemporary art world. Still, I am disappointed by how rarely I find it. Since the Second World War, it seems like we’ve all operated under a collective feeling of disillusionment – real or manufactured. There is always another tragic event in the news, another deconstructionist take on a once-beloved institution, another impassioned call for systemic justice. Sadness, anger, grief, and doubt have their place. But there’s a reason we’re all getting so tired of hearing about it.

While staying in Bergen, Norway, this spring, I visited its Kode Bergen Art Museum, which is hosting a selection of Harriet Backer’s (1845-1932) paintings. The exhibition is titled after a remark on her work from art historian Andreas Aubert: “Every Atom is Color.” It’s accurate in more ways than one. Not only does Backer’s work simmer with dynamic color combinations and masterful imitations of light, but her subject matter also presents a different kind of “color,” the local color that infused the tapestry of small-town Norwegian life.

Christian Krohg, portrait of Harriet Backer, before 1892

Looking at one of Backer’s paintings, you catch something different from other artists. She is a master of light, but her focus is not quite the same as Vermeer’s. She captures her world in loose brush strokes, but it feels a little softer than Monet’s. She notes fine details of human interaction, but the scenes hardly exude the dynamism of Michelangelo’s. To look at Backer’s work is to look at a community through the eyes of a woman.

Nor is it the same as we are often called upon to look through women’s eyes today. In this disillusioned world, we hear regularly about the darker sides of women’s experiences, from external threats like harassment and trafficking to internal ones like body dysmorphia or unequal representation in health studies. We need to know these things if we’re ever going to change them. But there are some days as a woman when I feel like the only way to “be” in this world is to fight it. When I’ve been presented with so many images of my own state of injustice or weakness or foolishness that I start to harden myself against … myself. I look around the women of the art world today, and I see so many seem to feel the same thing. We imbue our canvases with trauma and anger, and we hope things will improve.

Harriet Backer, The Old Cottage at Kolbotn, Hulda and Arne Garborg's Home, 1896 (photo by Nasjonalmuseet, CC BY-SA 4.0)

But Backer, I sensed at that exhibition, presents a model for women in art – and by extension for people in general. She fought to build a place for herself and other women in the male-dominated painting community of Europe. She rose to heights of technical achievement that made it extremely difficult to deny her place among the great artists of her time. And yet, she painted women sewing by lamplight. She painted mothers carrying their babies to church with the hope that they might find joy for ever and ever. She painted old couples sitting at their kitchen tables. She painted all the spaces where women were integral to community life.

Harriet Backer, Christening in Tanum Church, 1892

For most of history, rural Norway has been a particularly rough place to live. Short, beautiful summers cut through long, dark, bitterly cold winters. The same mountainous terrain that gives us majestic fjords made getting from one town to another a laborious undertaking – to say nothing of agriculture. Norwegians were finding their economic footing during Backer’s life, but it was not till more than thirty years after her death that oil wealth would turn the country into the rich (and expensive!) place it is today.

Yet Backer’s paintings don’t largely focus on hardship. Even her recently discovered depiction of the Uvdal Stave Church graveyard, the bright grass, rust-colored wood, and pastel sunset frame death in the familiarity of loved ones gone to rest. Backer’s world is one where women are celebrated for their role in upholding social life. Their lives weren’t perfect nor perfectly equal, but together they helped to build the places everyone could turn to when life inevitably got hard.

Harriet Backer, Uvdal Stave Church and Churchyard, 1906

I won’t hesitate to admit that, compared to many in our long modern series of increasingly “loneliest” generations, I have been blessed. Though I’ve gone through quite a few painful moments (some far more trying than my first year post-graduation), I’ve usually had a community or support system to help me get through them. I do not want to take away from the difficulties and tragedies that lead so many to find solace in artistic expression. But viewing the world a little more through the eyes of women like Backer may help us all appreciate our communities a little more.

The moments that Backer chose to spend her time on felt to me like her own kind of gratitude journal. She didn’t emphasize the slog of daily life or the frustrating fight for equality. Instead, she took time to appreciate the moments when people, especially women, formed social connections. When they worked alone by lamplight to finish much-needed chores. When they built up their towns into peaceful and prosperous places.

There will always be more battles to fight. Harriet Backer’s paintings are not the first to make me grateful for the support of my community, but they are the first in a long time that made me grateful to be a woman in it.

For more on auctions, exhibitions, and current trends, visit our Magazine Page