Interview by Gill Crabbe, FNG Research

As the Sinebrychoff Art Museum prepares to stage an exhibition on painting and the theatre, Gill Crabbe meets the show’s curator Laura Gutman, to discuss the research she carried out in order to bring this topic to life

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Meeting the independent curator Laura Gutman is like meeting a detective. As curator of several shows in Finland, where she moved from Paris 17 years ago, including the recent acclaimed ‘Air de Paris’ exhibition at Helsinki Art Museum (HAM), she has used her research skills and background studying art history under Guy Cogeval at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris in the 1990s to impressive effect in Finland. Not only has she been making intriguing connections between Finnish artists and their European counterparts, but also deepening understanding of European artworks in Finnish collections. It is a busy year for Gutman as she is now in the final stages of preparing a show on theatre and painting from the 17th to early 20th centuries titled ‘Moved to Tears: Staging Emotions’ at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum in Helsinki.

The museum is an appropriate setting for such a subject as it is the house of the collector Paul Sinebrychoff, whose wife Fanny Grahn was herself an actress, and their rooms on the first floor are laid out almost as a series of theatrical sets, each reflecting a period from his collection. The theme of the Sinebrychoff exhibition which is held in the galleries on the ground floor, is also a subject close to Gutman’s heart, since at the Ecole du Louvre she studied the theoretical and philosophical background to painting and theatre ‘from David to Degas’. After having attended a performance in Helsinki with Finnish singer Minna Nyberg, she has developed a particular interest in the use of Baroque gesture in the fine arts.

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Featured image: Louis Lagrenée the Elder, Pygmalion and his Statue, 1777, oil on canvas, 104cm x 86cm, Antell Collections, Finnish National Gallery, Sinebrychoff Art Museum. Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Antti Kuivalainen

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‘Moved to Tears: Staging Emotions’, Sinebrychoff Art Museum, Helsinki, 13 September 2018 – 3 March 2019