Riitta Ojanperä, PhD, Director, Collections Management, Finnish National Gallery

 

January 25, 2017

 

The year 2017 marks the centenary of Finland’s independence. The Finnish National Gallery, together with other Finnish cultural organisations, has designed its programmes underlining the historic span of Finnish cultural history. The FNG, with its three museums, extends to the still unseen future at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, to the highlights of its 19th- and 20th-century collections and collecting at the Ateneum Art Museum, and to European 17th-century painting that relates to the art shown at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum.

This momentous occasion creates an opportunity to reminisce about the important resources for art- historic and cultural-historic research that form a part of the national collections maintained at the Finnish National Gallery. The first acquisitions for the archival collections, made at the end of the 19th century, were artists’ letters. They were put forward by the Finnish Art Society founded in 1846, an organization that was vital in promoting Finnish art and laying the foundation for our collections.

From there on, the resources have increased significantly and keeping them available for the special interest group of researchers has been an important part of the Finnish National Gallery’s policy.

This year we are remodelling our ways of facilitating research. Our special focus is a new programme for collaborating with the future generation of art history scholars and art museum professionals.

Our wish is to raise new interest in research topics based on our resources. We also wish to be an active and innovative partner in collaborating with the academic scene with whom we deeply share the mission of reinforcing humanistic values and the importance of understanding the world and human culture by creating new, meaningful and relevant knowledge. For this purpose we will also be launching later this spring a call for master’s-level art history or cultural history students to work with us as research apprentices for a couple of months.

For more information on research topics and material please open at the top of the Home page a new section of this publication titled ‘FNG Resources’. The call for research apprentices will be added there later.

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Featured image: Selections from the Finnish National Gallery archive collections are shown permanently in the collections exhibition The Stories of Finnish Art at the Ateneum Art Museum. A display case containing material related to Finnish artists in Italy at the end of the 19th century
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Hannu Aaltonen

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