Gill Crabbe, FNG Research
A seminar organised as part of the Finnish National Gallery’s international research project, Gothic Modern, saw museum directors, scholars and curators gather in Helsinki to exchange ideas for a scientific publication on the topic. Gill Crabbe met Dr Ralph Gleis, Director of the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin and future Director General of the Albertina in Vienna, to find out why he was drawn to collaborate with Northern European museums and academics
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Dr Ralph Gleis is darting about the rooms and corners of the house museum we are exploring on the outskirts of Helsinki. He is here for a knowledge-sharing gathering for the Finnish National Gallery’s international research project on Gothic Modernism. As part of the programme the group is visiting the 1930s home of the art collectors Signe and Ane Gyllenberg specifically to see a work by Akseli Gallen-Kallela that is regarded as pivotal to the theme of Gothic Modernism, a term that over the four years of the research project is becoming an emerging genre. Scholars and museum professionals from the UK, Germany, Belgium, Norway and Finland have come together to explore new meanings and share their research with a view to producing a scientific publication on this topic. As we proceed through the elegant rooms of Villa Gyllenberg, replete with paintings by key Finnish painters from the 19th century, there is a mercurial quality to Dr Gleis’s curiosity as he homes in on the details that have caught his eye – a small painting of angels guarding a corpse in a field of ravens, sculptures of monk-like figures placed on window sills, Buddhist statues – then opens out his gaze to the view across the sea outside. After a while we enter the dedicated space that displays Gallen-Kallela’s extraordinary artwork Ad Astra (1907), with its androgenous female form rising through clouds, her red hair radiating fiery against the golden disc of the planet Jupiter. The curators and scholars respond and ask questions, turning over the Symbolist, mythical and esoteric themes that the painting prompts, themes which are present in the concept of the Gothic Modern project. After a while, Dr Gleis focuses on the carved gilded-wood doors attached to the frame that have been opened to reveal the canvas, and which act as a portal giving the artwork a hallowed status not unlike a Gothic altarpiece. He is intrigued by the tendrils represented in the openwork on the doors. These are no delicate filigrees but robust entwined stems. As the group move on, Vibeke Waallann Hansen, curator at the National Museum Oslo, hangs back and opens her cellphone to show Dr Gleis the decorative carvings of the medieval stave churches of Norway – noting perhaps a Gothic reference reimagined here by Gallen-Kallela in a modernist twist. It is informal moments like these that are invaluable when museum curators and scholars get together and share ideas and perspectives.
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Featured image: Hugo Simberg, The Garden of Death, 1896, gouache and watercolour on paper, 15.8cm x 17.5cm. Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Jenni Nurminen
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