ArtistSwedish
Siri Rathsman
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Siri Lovisa Rathsman was born on 28 July 1895 in Sundsvall, on Sweden's High Coast. Her formal art training began in 1913 at the Wilhelmson painting school in Gothenburg under Carl Wilhelmson, where she encountered Kurt Jungstedt and others who would shape her early development. She continued at the Valand Academy under Birger Simonsson before leaving for Paris in the early 1920s.
In Paris she enrolled at the Académie Moderne, studying under Raoul Dufy and Othon Friesz - two painters steeped in the post-Fauvist handling of colour and structure that would leave a lasting imprint on her work. It was Paris that held her: she spent the greater part of her adult life there, working across painting, printmaking, and ceramics, and building a parallel career as a journalist. From 1921 to 1966 she contributed as Paris correspondent for Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, sometimes writing under the pseudonym Comtesse Belloni.
The pivot toward non-figurative work came through her time at Atelier 17, Stanley William Hayter's influential Paris printmaking studio. There she absorbed the principles of surrealist automatism, working alongside artists including Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy. The studio's ethos - that the unconscious could be tapped through the physical resistance of intaglio processes - aligned with her move away from the figurative training she had received in Sweden. Her oils and graphic works from the mid-century carry the marks of this double formation: structured colour fields that retain a sense of bodily gesture.
Rathsman's public breakthrough in Sweden came with a retrospective at the Swedish-French art gallery in 1951, which gathered works from 1919 onward and confirmed her standing across three decades of practice. Her work is held in the collections of Moderna Museet, Nationalmuseum, Gothenburg Museum of Art, Malmö Art Museum, Kalmar Art Museum, and Norrköping Art Museum.
She died on 30 July 1974 in the Brännkyrka parish of Stockholm, two days after her 79th birthday. At auction, Rathsman's work appears across several Swedish houses - Göteborgs Auktionsverk, Stockholms Auktionsverk, Karlstad Hammarö Auktionsverk, Bukowskis, and Metropol each hold portions of the 21 lots documented on Auctionist. Top results include an oil titled "Grupp med träd" at 11,500 SEK and "Arabgosse" at 11,000 SEK, with pastel and mixed-media compositions reaching into the 2,000-3,000 SEK range. Prices reflect a market that has not yet fully caught up with her institutional presence.