La garçonne från Söderhamn

If the modernist movement in Sweden and Finland during the first two decades of the 20th century were a film, Ulla Bjerne would have been an extra in it. And an important one. She would appear in a good number of scenes as she seems to have known everyone who played a significant role in the arts and letters, particularly within the avantgarde. (But extra is not the right word here, extras are silent. Ulla Bjerne was never silent.)

She was good friends with, and sometimes had romantic relationships with, the following Swedish arts and letters giants. Evert Taube, Nils Dardel, GAN (Gösta Adrian-Nilsson - one of Sweden's most prolific pioneers and most sought after within the gay community; he was an expressionist, a futurist, a cubist and finally a surrealist!), Isaac Grünewald, Einar Jolin,Leander Engström, Frans G Bengtsson.

And many more, also later on in Finland.

”The life and work of Ulla Bjerne” has been my on-again off-again hobby for more than a decade.

One day I will present a film or a book about her fascinating personality. (There is manuscript but there is no time.)

I have, I believe, the largest collection of her books. (Easy, I would imagine nobody else collects them.) Rivaled only by the library in her home in Lovisa by the Gulf of Finland.

I have travelled in Ulla's footsteps in Copenhagen, Paris and elsewhere in France where she spent a good deal of the 1910's and 20's.

Also, I have visited places and people in Finland where she 1921 became Ulla (Bjerne-)Biaudet when she married the Léon Biaudet, a physician of local prominence, and came to be involved in the litterary circles of modernist Swedish-speaking Finland.

Ulla Bjerne

The author Ulla Bjerne was an eccentric in her own right, less extravagantly so than Luisa Casati Stampa (below), however visually striking and controversial as she would favour men's clothing, smoke a pipe and look like a garçonne a decade before the style was popularized in the 20's.

She wrote some 30 books between 1916 and 1958, all of them dealing with the same theme: a woman's (or a man's) right to choose her (or his) own way of living. There is a constant stream of gender playfulness and provocation in her texts

Above is her portrait painted by Swedish artist Isaac Grünewald 1916. This painting was the first modernist acquisition by the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and caused an uproar among conservative art lovers. (The painting is now part of the Moderna museet collection.)