Ari Tanhuanpää, PhD, Senior Conservator, Finnish National Gallery, Sinebrychoff Art Museum, Helsinki

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This article is based on the lecture given at the ‘Object Biographies, Second International Artefacta Conference’, organised by Artefacta, The Finnish Network for Artefact Studies, in collaboration with the Finnish Antiquarian Society and Nordic Association of Conservators in Finland, held at the House of Science and Letters, Helsinki 2–3 March 2018

When browsing through a book by a Belgian art historian Roger H. Marijnissen, entitled Dégradation, conservation et restauration de l´œuvre d´art (1967) a phrase caught my attention and began to haunt me:

Il est parfois difficile, voire impossible de faire une nette distinction entre l´usure et la patine. [1]

This translates in English as: ‘It is sometimes difficult, or even impossible, to make a sharp distinction between effacement and patina.’ This led me to ponder such questions as time, which, as Aristotle stated (Physics, 217b) ‘is that which is not’, or is only ‘barely and scarcely’[2], and the working of the artwork which transcends its materiality. The fundamental question of my paper is, however: can we really draw a strict demarcation line between life and death?[3]

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[1] R.-H. Marijnissen. Dégradation, conservation et restauration de l´œuvre d´art (Bruxelles: Éditions Arcade, 1967), 168–69.

[2] Jacques Derrida. ‘Ousia and Grammē: Note on a Note from Being and Time.’ In Margins of Philosophy. Translated, with Additional Notes, by Alan Bass (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982), 39.

[3] Derrida argued that ontical disciplines – such as biology and anthropology – ‘naively put into operation more or less clear conceptual presuppositions (Vorbegriffe) about life and death’. Jacques Derrida. Aporias. Transl. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993), 29.

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Featured image: How much usure can an artwork endure? Isak Wacklin, Miss Heckford, 1757 (detail), oil on canvas , Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum. Photo: Finnish National Gallery, Conservation Department

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Irene Riihimäki, MA student, University of Helsinki

This article is published as a result of a three-month research internship at the Finnish National Gallery, during which Irene Riihimäki studied material in the Archive Collections of the Finnish National Gallery

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‘It is childish to long for native art; Finland can never be a land for artists.’
– It was not long ago when this sentiment was commonly heard; in this way many speak even today, but their number is becoming smaller and smaller.^[1]

This article focuses on early art education in Finland from the 1840s to the end of the 1860s. During this time the backbone of art education was created in The Grand Duchy of Finland. Before the 1840s there was no institution in the country focusing primarily on educating artists. The distinction between the artist profession and craftsmanship emerged during this time and was connected to the development of the schooling system for artists. The artist’s new identity was accompanied by the founding of art academies.

An important step in Finland creating its own generation of artists was the foundation of the Finnish Art Society in 1846. Another important contributor was the Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki in the mid-19th century. The most essential source material for this article has been the Finnish Art Society’s minutes with appendices from the years 1846–69. These minutes include, for example, information about acquisitions of works of art, exhibitions and letters sent to the board by artists.^[2] Circumstances in Finland were challenging during the mid-19th century. During this 20-year period Finland endured the Crimean War, from 1853 to 1856, a cholera epidemic and the Famine of 1866–68. Despite all of these difficulties there were hopes of improving the education system for artists.

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^[1] Papperslyktan 15 October 1860. My translation.

^[2] The oldest part of this material (years 1846–1901) is available in digitised form. It can be read from the website: http://www.lahteilla.fi/styp/.

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Featured image: Berndt Abraham Godenhjelm, Aiax, a Study of a Plaster Cast, undated, charcoal on paper, 44cm x 41.5cm
Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum. Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Ainur Nasretdin

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Olesya Turkina PhD and Victor Mazin PhD

Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe was an idiosyncratic Russian artist whose rise to stardom came in the wake of perestroika, as he pushed the boundaries of identity, gender and celebrity status through his reinventions of the world’s iconic stars. Researchers Dr. Olesya Turkina and Dr. Victor Mazin[1] survey his short career, as Kiasma mounts his first solo show in Finland

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A star

The star of Vladislav Yurievich Mamyshev-Monroe ascended at the beginning of perestroika. In fact, perestroika started not in politics but in art. In 1982, Timur Novikov founded the Novye khudozhniki (New Artists) group; in 1984, Sergey Kuryokhin organised the Popular Mechanics orchestra; and only then, in 1985, the newly elected relatively young General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev began talking about the need for perestroika. Vladislav Mamyshev saw in Gorbachev the swapping of the male archetype for female, militarist policy for pacifist. The artist marked his official portrait of the General Secretary with a bindi – third eye and a sign of truth in Hinduism, which is also a mark of married women. This collage is the first artwork by Mamyshev to have been widely recognised. A portrait of Gorbachev by Vladislav Mamyshev, of course, was bound for success in the mass media, and set the artist up for stardom. It was reprinted by a number of leading Western magazines, in particular, by the German magazine Stern (Star).

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[1] About Olesya Turkina and Victor Mazin, see http://www.mg-lj.si/en/events/2036/a-short-history-of-necrorealism/ .

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Featured image: Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe performing in Helsinki in 1991. Photo Sakari Viika

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’Russian Stardust’, 9 February – 29 July, 2018, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki