page_title: Tyra Kleen
section_title: Europe
hierarchical_section_title: Tyra Kleen / Biography / Europe
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of the Swedish painter Tyra Kleen.
context_page_description: Tyra Kleen was a Swedish artist, author and women's rights activist. Her paintings, illustrations, lithographs and publications were important to the Swedish fin de siècle art movement. But above all she was an independent ethnographical researcher.
context_section_description: When she moved to Rome in 1898 because she was not accepted in Paris by the Theosophic movement, she joined a theosophical society in Rome and attended its meetings and lectures. She befriended persons like Anna Maria Roos and Mary and Jean Karadja Pascha.
  She spent ten years in Rome as part of the contemporary cultural elite. She met Anders and Emma Zorn, Ellen Key, Carl Milles, Helena Nygren, Hjalmar Söderberg and Ottilia Adelborg; and later also went to live in Berlin and Paris. She traveled extensively, in 1910 to India and Ceylon and in 1919–1921 in Java and Bali, where she studied dance, being inspired in Paris by the performances of Mata Hari. She exhibited her work in Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Rome, Paris, London and St. Petersburg. She visited the Caribbean and the United States and organized an exhibition in New York in 1917. Kleen was very well equipped in organising and networking using contacts and relatives in the world of diplomacy, freemasonry, theosophy, feminism and the local magistry. She excelled at becoming intimate with people who could be useful for her career.
caption: Tyra Kleen in 1912
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