On
Sunday 10th January 2009, I went with Carol to Northern Stars and Southern Lights: The Golden Age of Finnish Art
1870-1920. After the fitful genius of Paintings
from Poland in November 2007, I had high hopes that this exposé of Finnish
art would be as enthralling. I cannot say that it was, but then I was not in a
good mood when I saw the show. I found the exhibition of Finnish Art a grim
experience. Dublin was cold and snow was expected. I was feeling old and
fearful for my mother’s health and for my future – so seeing parts of this
exhibition was like being taken into a melancholy ward to die. I found many of
these paintings gripped with a nihilistic hopelessness that I could easily
identify with. However, for once I longed for more beautiful escapist art.
The
show was dominated by pictures of pretty children, sorrowful children, pretty
women, working women, social deprivation, middle-class bliss, winter landscapes
and strange Nordic myths. Overall I found the technical standard of drawing and
painting quite high. It was Salon art with workman like draughtsmanship,
unusual compositions and odd pallets dominated by whites, greys, greens, pinks
and blues– often in an attempt to outdo photography with minute details,
intense lighting, obscure narratives and symbolically laden subjects.
The
exhibition was divided up thematically into six sections; Naturalism in Finnish Art, Influence from France, Epic Landscapes,
Legends and Myths, The 1900 World Fair and Early Modernism. In the first section there were some sorrowful
paintings of children by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, but nothing compared to the
apocalyptic looking painting Under The
Yoke (Burning the Brushwood), 1893, by Eero Jarnefelt. It was an odd
painting, combining the usually idealistic and flattering techniques of
academic art - with agi-prop social record. The soot covered face of the little
girl in the centre of the painting, her clothes in rags, standing in front of
burning fires of wood, smoke billowing up around her - as she stared out
bleakly at the viewer - haunted my nightmares for months to come. As social
propaganda against; child labour, the exploitation of the poor and the
ecological destruction of the land - it was compelling. Its grating Naturalism
was unforgettable - however as art I did not think it worked. It lacked the
universal vision of a true masterpiece.
Albert
Edelfet was represented by Conveying the
Child’s Coffin, 1879, a large luminous painting of a group of people on a
boat - bring a coffin across a lake. In was typical of much of the socially
conscious academic art of the 1870s which was inspired by the socialist examples
of French masters like Courbet and Millet. Edelfelt superbly deployed academic
drawing, composition and tonal-shading – enlivened by a lighter more
Impressionist inspired pallet - to record a grim moment in Finnish life.
Edelfelt had captured the intense low light of the North excellently and the
painting seemed to radiate. However, it had a staged, posed and wooden feeling
that made it unconvincing as great art.
Fanny Churberg was represented by some wonderfully fresh alla-prima paintings of skies painted with vigorous and intense flat brush strokes. In fact they were some of the few - free and sensual paintings in the show. On the other hand Pekka Halonen in The Short Cut, 1892 and later in The 1900 World Fair section with Washing on the Ice, 1900, managed to paint some of the bleakest, most depressing and frigid pictures I had ever seen.
Later in the Influence from France section, Albert Edelfelt was this time represented by much more atmospheric, sensual and romantic paintings of pretty young women; reading books under trees, learning to play piano, or posed looking invitingly at the viewer. Other’s like Gunnar Berndtson and Akseli Gallen-Kallela also proved themselves adept at making attractive portraits of pretty middle class Finnish girls - and recording the easy going delights of family life.
Some of the landscapes represented Finland as a barren, inhospitable, lonely wilderness. The extreme coldness of Finland depicted was unusually poignant to me - after weeks of temperatures as low as -3 degrees Centigrade in Dublin. So, I marvelled at these painters fortitude painting in an even colder climate – sometimes out of doors!
The unsurpassed masterpiece of the landscape section (and maybe the whole show) was Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s Imatra in Winter, 1893. This huge canvas of an icy river, bounded by banks of deep snow and trees densely frosted with snowflakes was epic in its intensity. Gallen-Kallela had managed to go beyond the merely picturesque and animated nature. His masterful and evocative use of a Mirada of whites haunted my imagination. However most of the rest of the landscape section was undistinguished - apart from its unusual Northern topography.
The low point of the show for me was the Legends and Myths section, with its crude folk revival art that verged on the comically bad. It exposed the poverty of Gallen-Kallela and Hugo Simberg’s imaginations, the limitations of their technique and immaturity of their visions. Akseli Gallen-Kallela reappeared again with two of the most ridiculous looking paintings I had ever seen. Aino Myth, Triptych, 1889, which seemed like nothing more than an excuse to show lots of naked Finnish girls being chased by a long bearded old man. (Although I did enjoy seeing his use of the ancient Nordic Swastika all around the frame of the picture - long before in the hands of Hitler it became a symbol of race-hate, vengeance and death.) While The Forging of the Sampo, 1893, looked like nothing but a children’s book illustration rendered with all the skill and lack of imagination of an academic oil painter. I hadn’t a clue what any of these old myths meant and I didn’t care – I hated myths.
At least Akseli Gallen-Kallela had technical skill, Hugo Simberg on the other hand was as crude as an adolescent. His work was too illustrational and rudimentary – he simply did not have the visionary power of James Ensor working in Ostend or Edvard Munch in Oslo at the same time.
The final modernist section, like with that of ‘Paintings from Poland’ in 2007, displayed a noticeable decline in originality and authenticity as Finnish artists pastiched (with some skill and panache) the latest trends of Post-Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism in Paris. They were always four or five years too late, and never contributed anything new to these movements.
Seeing most of this art only served to prove to me how necessary modernist’s like Cézanne, van Gogh, Munch, Matisse and Picasso had been - to render truly visionary and technically powerful art in an age of polite and commercial art. Their oeuvres had taken the same questions of; social life, form, subjectivity, primitivism, myth and sexuality – which these Finnish and a host of other minor European artists had been battling with - and given convincing, hard won and transcendent answers.
Overall, I found this show educational and enjoyable. Given my depressed mood, I felt I had not given the exhibition a fair enough look. So I instantly vowed to go back again when my spirits were better. However, unforeseen events would make that impossible.