Painted during one of Holmström’s formative visits to Marseille in the 1930s or 1940s, this expressive portrait exemplifies her deep engagement with themes of identity, individuality, and cross-cultural encounter. The subject, a Black man rendered with striking psychological intensity, is one of several individuals Holmström encountered in the bustling, diverse port city of Marseille, a place that became a second home to her during her many travels.
Holmström’s sustained interest in people from the African and Mediterranean diasporas was not incidental, it was shaped by a lifetime of intellectual exposure, social awareness, and personal adversity. She grew up at Hvilan, the first community college in Sweden, run by her progressive parents. It was an intellectually dynamic environment where major contemporary issues were actively discussed. Notably, Hvilan introduced classes for women as early as the 1870s, fostering a spirit of inclusion and inquiry that would stay with her. Holmström led a nomadic life, often lacking resources and frequently relying on borrowed lodgings and studio space. In a letter, she confessed that her most common dream was “looking for lodgings”, a metaphor for the instability and marginality she experienced, and perhaps a reason she gravitated toward painting others at the margins of society.
Her first extended journey abroad came in 1907, when she traveled to Paris. There she studied Matisse’s private collection and met Rainer Maria Rilke, then secretary to Auguste Rodin. Her bold style, heavily influenced by Matisse, Kandinsky, and Jawlensky, was met with criticism upon her return home. At the Baltic Exhibition in Malmö (1914), her vivid palette and expressive handling were considered “brutal” and “insufficiently feminine”, a type of gendered critique she would face throughout her career.
These obstacles however only sharpened her vision. Holmström developed a language of bold, unmodulated colour planes, flat spatial constructions, and psychologically intense compositions. Her portraits from Marseille, such as this one, stand as some of her most radical works. In this painting, her close-cropped, vibrant treatment of the sitter reflects her deep emotional engagement and her belief in portraiture as a conduit for empathy.
Marseille’s rough seaport, with its mix of poverty, labor unrest, and migration, offered her a stark contrast to the Scandinavian art world. One day, she spotted a woman with a child on her hip, Cathérine, an illiterate mother of seven from Algeria. Cathérine became one of Holmström’s most beloved models and helped anchor her lifelong exploration of social themes, motherhood, alienation, resilience. The painting Strangers, for instance, typifies many of the themes she would revisit, figures on the margins, the enduring bond between mother and child, and the quiet presence of human dignity.
As she once declared, “I long for everywhere in the world”, a sentiment that underpinned not only her travels but her profound openness to other cultures and lives. Unusually cosmopolitan for a Swedish artist of her time, Holmström was skilled in multiple languages and built an expansive international network. Her works from Marseille, this portrait among them, stand as rare and progressive acts of representation in early 20th century Scandinavian art.
