Kirsi Eskelinen, PhD, Museum Director, Finnish National Gallery / Sinebrychoff Art Museum

 

30 November, 2023

 

This issue of FNG Research concentrates on the research behind the two recently opened exhibitions, ‘Peder Balke – The Spell of the Arctic’, at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum and ‘Colour & Light – The Legacy of Impressionism’, at the Ateneum Art Museum. The first is a monographic exhibition of the Norwegian painter Peder Balke (1804–87), which is presented to a Finnish audience for the first time. An important exhibition had taken place at the National Gallery in London in 2014, but the Norwegian painter of the Romantic era still remains less well-known internationally. Balke was fascinated by Arctic landscapes. Following his trip to the North Cape in the 1830s, he repeatedly depicted his visions of the north for the rest of his life. Balke was open-minded and experimental in his painting technique. His late output becomes almost abstract. Gill Crabbe interviews the co-curator of the exhibition Dr philos. Knut Ljøgodt, who is Director of the Nordic Institute of Art, about the concept and the aim of the show. The exhibition at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum is a collaboration with the Institute.

In October the Ateneum Art Museum opened the exhibition ‘Colour & Light – The Legacy of Impressionism’. In her article ‘Echoes of Impressionism in Finland’, Dr Marja Sakari, the museum’s Director, writes about one of the starting points for the ’Colour & Light’ exhibition: why the effects of Impressionism were not seen in Finnish art until the first two decades of the 20th century. Her article concentrates on the French and Belgian art exhibition that was organised at the Ateneum in 1904. The senior advisor to the exhibition is Professor Anthea Callen, who is interviewed in this issue by Gill Crabbe. Prof Callen discusses her role in contributing to the project, including her research into the Impressionist and Neoimpressionist works that Finnish artists were exposed to, and brings her particular expertise in the material culture of western European artists of the period.

The Ateneum Art Museum is actively promoting research work on its collections in conjunction with its upcoming exhibitions. At the moment there are several joint research projects being undertaken with international partners at the Finnish National Gallery. In the spring of this year the Ateneum organised a seminar as a part of an international research project called Gothic Modern, which aims to share and exchange ideas for a scientific publication in connection with the exhibition taking place on this theme in the autumn of 2024. Gill Crabbe met Dr Ralph Gleis, one of the participants of the seminar in Helsinki. Dr Gleis has been Director of the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin for several years, and was recently appointed Director of the Albertina in Vienna, a post he is taking up in 2025. The interview with Dr Gleis gives a good grounding in the four-year research project and its goals.

Another international research project, which is underway at the Finnish National Gallery concerns ‘Pioneering Women Artists’. Its first conference ‘Crossing Borders: Transnational Networks of Pioneering Women Artists’ was held in September at the Ateneum Art Museum. The project will culminate in a scholarly publication and an exhibition in Helsinki at the Ateneum, which will also travel to the Düsseldorf Kunstpalast, in 2025.

Meanwhile, the Sinebrychoff Art Museum is preparing a major exhibition in Helsinki on the great Venetian Renaissance Master Jacopo Bassano. Scheduled for September 2024, this monographic show presents Bassano’s work for the first time in Europe outside Italy. The exhibition includes several less well-known paintings and rare drawings executed in coloured chalks. The curators of the exhibition are Dr Kirsi Eskelinen and Dr Claudia Caramanna, both of whom are Bassano scholars.

Finally, I would like to draw your attention to our annual call for research interns for 2024. Applications will be taken until 31 December 2023, and the two interns selected will be announced on 15 January 2024. Details of how to apply are in this issue.

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Featured image: Hiroshige, Gio Temple in Snow, Geishas Greeting each other in Snowfall before the Temple Gate, undated, woodblock print, 23.8cm x 36.9cm (paper)
Finnish National Gallery / Sinebrychoff Art Museum
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Jenni Nurminen

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Leevi Haapala, PhD, Museum Director, Finnish National Gallery / Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma

 

22 August, 2023

 

Tom of Finland is renowned for his signature style and iconic drawings of modern, liberated gay men. In April 2023, the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma / Finnish National Gallery opened its exhibition ‘Bold Journey’, along with an accompanying publication, highlighting the artist’s long artistic career and impact on 20th-century visual culture, particularly on iconic representations of hypermasculinity. Driven by pleasure – that of the artist, the figures in the drawings, and the audience – Tom of Finland’s imagination is embedded in shifting identities and role-play.

Nowadays, Tom of Finland, aka Touko Laaksonen (1920–91), justifiably carries the epithet of ‘Finland’s most internationally famous artist’. However, from the 1950s to the 1970s, he was known in Helsinki only as Touko Laaksonen, a talented graphic artist, working as an advertising executive at McCann Erickson, and a musician who had studied at the Sibelius Academy. It was only late in his life, while shuttling between Helsinki and Los Angeles, that he began appearing in public as the famed gay icon Tom of Finland and not until the early 1990s onwards that he started to gain recognition, both in Finland and elsewhere, explicitly as an artist rather than just a homoerotic illustrator. California’s balmy weather, the abundance of male models, and the Tom House leatherman community offered Tom a welcoming winter sanctuary, while in summer he returned to work in the peace, privacy and natural beauty of his homeland.

It was not until the very end of his career that Tom finally gained artistic recognition in his homeland. His memorial retrospective was held at Galerie Pelin in Helsinki in 1992. At the time, the Museum of Contemporary Art acquired two drawings from that show, which paved the way to Tom’s public acceptance, as did Ilppo Pohjola’s documentary film Daddy and the Muscle Academy the previous year. Little by little, Tom progressed from ‘gay artist’ to ‘artist’ until finally wider audiences were ready to call him their own.

Until the 1990s, the Finnish public had seen Tom’s drawings mostly only in comics exhibitions within the arts scene. In 1990, he received the Puupäähattu Award for Finnish Comics Artists, and later that year his drawings were featured in a comics exhibition organised by the Artists’ Association MUU. In its special ‘sex’ issue, the Finnish magazine Image (3/1990) published an extensive illustrated article, quoting an interview published earlier that year in Prätkäposti (Biker Mail). From October to December 1991, original illustrations from the Kake and Mike comic strips series were presented in Ruutujen aika. Suomen Sarjakuvaseuran kaksi vuosikymmentä (Frames: Two Decades of the Finnish Comics Society) at the Amos Anderson Art Museum in Helsinki. Also that year, two of Tom’s drawings appeared as examples of Finnish underground comics in Koko hajanainen kuva. Suomalaisen taiteen 80-luku (The Whole Fragmentary Picture: Finnish Art in the Eighties), a 1991 book by Marja-Terttu Kivirinta and Leena-Maija Rossi, designed by Ilppo Pohjola.

Major public recognition followed in 1992, after the Finnish publishing house Otava published the extensive biography, written by F. Valentine Hooven III, Tom of Finland – Elämäkerta (Biography, translated into Finnish by Eeva-Liisa Jaakkola).^[1] In 2017, it was republished by another Finnish publishing house, Like, with a new foreword and subtitled Marginaalista maailmanmaineeseen (‘From the Margins to World Fame’).^[2] In the original biography, Tom is referred to only by his pseudonym, never by his real name. In a letter to his friend, written from Laakso hospital in 1991, Tom aired his thoughts on the flurry of fame that came to him in the twilight of his career:

That same scribbler Valentine Hooven was here for the second time around midsummer. He is writing my biography, which will be published in Finnish by OTAVA in the New Year. A video about me will be released around the same time. They also want to organise a ‘real art exhibition’ of my drawings in Helsinki – suddenly everyone is going wild about me. How times have changed! Or have they?
 – Tom of Finland’s letter to his friend in Helsinki, 9 July 1991

Archival findings and cultivating our national artist’s legacy

One key resource for the Kiasma exhibition was an archive that was donated in 2001, with additional material added in 2005, to the Finnish National Gallery’s Archival Collections by one of Touko Laaksonen’s long-time friends, who wished to remain anonymous. The archive contains letters, cards, newspaper clippings, photos, videos, magazines, books and calendars. A curator of the Archival Collections, Veikko Pakkanen, reminded me in person about this specific archive before retiring. To our delight, the current exhibition’s curatorial team – myself, chief curator João Laia and project manager Patrik Nyberg – came across four original works of art among this large volume of material. The drawings are now in the process of being added to the art collection, so that there will be 13 Tom of Finland drawings held by the Finnish National Gallery. We are also still confirming the authenticity of two more photographic collages from this archive, to be authorised by the Tom of Finland Foundation.

This important change in the status of archival material is part of the recognition of Tom of Finland’s originals as one entity within the art collection. Already in the winter of 2022, five of the artist’s drawings, which for several years had been on long-term loan from the HIV Foundation Finland, were purchased and added to the National Gallery’s collections at Kiasma. It is of key importance that finally Tom of Finland’s artworks are recognised and respected and not seen as comics or categorised as archival documents; that they belong to the core contemporary art collection at the Finnish National Gallery, and that he is our national artist. In this way these works become more easily accessible to scholars, curators and to the multiple audiences of our online collections and our forthcoming exhibitions. This final change in his artistic legacy was also recognised in the recent Frieze art review about the exhibition and encapsulated in its title ‘Tom of Finland Hitches a Ride into the Mainstream’, by Harry Tafoya.^[3]

Scholarly queer re-recognitions

In this issue of FNG Research we republish one of the new articles in Bold Journey, which was published together with Parvs Publishing: ’Boys will be boys? – Some Notes on Tom of Finland’, written by adjunct curator at Tate and Contributing Editor for Frieze Alvin Li. In his article Li emphasises the notion of Tom of Finland’s legacy for new generations. Li was born in 1993, two years after Tom passed away, and tries to recall the moment when he most likely first encountered Tom of Finland’s drawings – which were in the form of digital reproductions on Tumblr. Tom’s imagery can be also criticised on the basis of the images’ ‘(over)performance of homomasculinity’ or their commercial merchandise potential. There has also been increasing recognition of the widening scope of sexualities since the early 1990s. Li summarises both the progress of feminist and queer scholarly work undertaken so far but also the potentiality of the bodily truth of gay desire in Tom of Finland’s drawings. Parallel realities among LGBTIQ+ communities and generations can find different ways and reasons to identify with his imagery or at least to recognise the value of his emancipatory impact and human rights work among minorities over the decades.

Alongside the Tom of Finland exhibition at Kiasma is a new collection display, ‘Dreamy’, guest-curated by Max Hannus, which focusses on queer perspectives on the Kiasma collections at the Finnish National Gallery. In their article ‘Entry to a Land that Is Not’, Hannus gives curatorial insights about the process of getting to know our collections from this point of view. For some years now, we have been keeping three-option statistics on the gender of artists. In their essay, Hannus likes to find a specific time category named as queer time as a key to understanding the thematics of the show and as a point of entry into the collections: “‘Dreamy’ is an exhibition where dreams, fantasies, nightmares, visions, and scenes are seen as signs of queerness existing in the world and of the potential for sharing, finding common ground. How has art documented queer time over time? And how can we, as viewers of art, find entry to something we couldn’t even dream of? Queer time opposes itself to the linear time of order. It is outside chronology, another reality and parallel to straight time.’

During the Covid-19 pandemic Kiasma was celebrating 30 years of collecting contemporary art for the Finnish National Gallery’s Collection and published a collection book entitled The Many Forms of Contemporary Art. For that book I researched Kiasma’s international collection and how it has been formed over the years. In my article, which we republish in this issue of FNG Research, I summarise the geographies, the developments in arts, and also different collections within the overall collection, as well as the link between the exhibition programme and the profile of the international art collection, which go hand in hand. I wrote that still the key question concerns how we understand our own time: ‘A collection of contemporary art lives with the changing world. Our national collection is being built in relation to the international art field around the world, yet from a given location. The planet has shrunk as a consequence of travel and the internet. The primary aim of the collection is not to fill an art-historical canon, but rather, to actively shape it and be prepared to tell stories of our own time.’

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[1] The book was published in English in 1993 by St Martin’s Press, New York, with a title Tom of Finland: His Life and Times.

[2] Translated into English from F. Valentine Hooven III’s original text Tom of Finland – Life and Work of a Gay Hero.

[3] See https://www.frieze.com/article/tom-of-finland-bold-journey-review-2023.

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Featured image: Installation view of the ‘Tom of Finland – Bold Journey’ exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, 2023
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Petri Virtanen

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Marja Sakari, PhD, Museum Director, Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum

 

22 November 2022

 

One of the best-known ‘old masters’ in Finnish art history is undoubtedly the painter Albert Edelfelt. One might think one knows his art through and through, but still there have been new books and much new research published lately. These are shedding light, for example, on everything from the artist’s republican political ideas, to his married life. One aspect of recent research has focused on his career as a cultural ambassador for Finnish art at the end of the 19th century. Times change and accordingly so do the perspectives; new archival materials can be found or new truths revealed when one reads already-existing materials from different angles.

The current edition of FNG Research is mostly dedicated to articles concerning Albert Edelfelt. As I write this Editorial, the exhibition ‘Albert Edelfelt: Modern artist life in fin-de-siècle Europe’ is open at the Gothenburg Museum of Art (22 October 2022 – 12 March 2023). The exhibition arrived in Gothenburg from the Petit Palais in Paris, where it had reached almost 140,000 visitors. It seems that Nordic art is now inspiring the international public in the same way that it had done when the artists were still living at the end of 19th century.

For many years at the Ateneum we have been working to promote our classics internationally and to collaborate with museums in Europe. The aim of this kind of co-operation is not only to increase the international impact of our museum or to boost the visibility of our brand abroad, but also to learn and exchange knowledge on many levels.

The exhibition at the Petit Palais in Paris was on display in Spring of this year (10 March – 10 July 2022). It was the result of extensive international negotiations, meetings and knowledge-sharing workshops. The most hectic planning occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, as it was not possible to meet face to face. Nevertheless, the process showed that it was possible to develop the concept of an exhibition through online contact. The Chief Curator of the Petit Palais, Anne-Charlotte Cathelineau, met virtually with our curators Hanne Selkokari and Anne-Maria Pennonen via Teams. As it turned out, their first face-to-face meeting took place only at the opening of the exhibition in March 2022.

As the result of this exchange, we are publishing several articles in this issue of FNG Research. Without this collaboration, we would not have benefitted from the research into, for example, the French Press reviews from Edelfelt’s time. Anne-Charlotte Cathelineau writes about the reception of Edelfelt’s art, starting from his first success at the Salon in Paris in 1877. Her article introduces many earlier, previously unresearched writings in the Parisian Press. We can discover just how important a place Edelfelt was able to occupy in the Parisian art scene during his long stay in the French capital. As Cathelineau states, reading the Press notices from the 1880s and 1890s, it is clear that critics were becoming more aware of a specific Nordic school and its main representatives. From various articles published from that time, she is able to conclude that the praise for foreign artists played into an attempt to revitalise the French school, which many critics of the day saw was in need of renewal.

Two more articles on Edelfelt in this issue consider different aspects of his career. Anne-Maria Pennonen focuses on the cosmopolitan side of the artist, while Hanne Selkokari highlights Edelfelt’s artworks in the Ateneum Art Museum’s collection and his role as an art expert and intermediary on the Finnish art-scene.

This edition is also introducing a much younger and less well-known artist, namely Elga Sesemann. Her art has been exhibited lately in some of our thematic shows, such as ‘Urban Encounters’, in 2018, and ‘Modern Woman’, in the Spring of this year. In her article ‘Hauntings: Taking a Look at Elga Sesemann’s Landscapes’, Emmi Halmesvirta introduces the Derridian term hauntology, a way of bringing to the present mental ghosts that haunt the present, in her analysis of some of Sesemann’s works. This term fits her art perfectly, as Sesemann’s family was forced to flee their home when Finland lost large parts of Karelia and the city of Vyborg during the Second World War. The artist’s traumatic experiences are a ‘haunting’, appearing in the melancholic atmosphere in many of her paintings. As Halmesvirta writes: ‘It is interesting to consider these [Sesemann’s] landscapes of the city from the viewpoint of haunting, because of the spectral quality of the figures in some of them.’ Hauntology has opened for her a new way of looking at the connection between the past and the present in Sesemann’s art.

The third topic in this issue of FNG Research is the conservation of contemporary art works and how the profession has changed over recent decades. Siukku Nurminen has enjoyed a long career as senior conservator of contemporary art for the Finnish National Gallery. In an interview in this edition, she describes her involvement in Sheela Gowda’s installation, Collateral, shown at the recent ARS22 exhibition. The work included materials that are used to make incense in India which were burnt in Kiasma in situ on metal grids, the ephemeral ashes reminding us of the impermanence of life. From the conservators’ point of view this work presented a challenge; first how to burn anything safely in a museum and secondly what to do with the remaining ashes on deinstallation. As the exhibition has now ended, the ashes are being donated for use in the making of ceramics. It is another transformation that will return the materials to the continuum of life. In this case, it is the materiality and the memory of the former artwork that will be haunting us, as new ceramic objects emerge.

Finally, I would like to draw your attention to our annual call for research interns for 2023. Applications will be taken until 31 December 2022, and two interns selected by 20 January 2023. Details of how to apply are in this issue.

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Featured image: Albert Edelfelt, From St Cloud Park, Paris, 1905, oil on canvas, 65cm x 81.5cm. Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Hannu Pakarinen

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Leevi Haapala, PhD, Museum Director, Finnish National Gallery / Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma

 

6 July 2022

 

A work of art always needs a material support and structure to be presented to an audience. And art is always exhibited in specific circumstances that are framed by the cultural and political discussions of the day. In our summer edition of FNG Research, we have selected four different articles, which at first glance are not easy to categorise according to specific thematic guidelines. Still, taking them all together, the questions of materiality, objecthood and the art beholder’s presence in the shared space with the work of art, seem to be relevant even if the artworks derive from different time periods.

Materiality and the sense of touch are very topical interests for living artists, along with the intensification of societal topics. The Chief Curator of exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma João Laia opens the key narratives in the ARS22 exhibition entitled ‘Living Encounters’. Our aim in the show was to include a multitude of different media to highlight the variety of contemporary practices, which artists are using today. At the same time, we also wanted to bring together a range of local and global geographies and in so doing making various material cultures visible. Then alongside the artefacts there is temporary live art as well as performances to create a specific atmosphere for the show. Laia reminds us in his article that ‘(b)y countering mediated forms of isolated digital connectivity with actual bodily and dialogical exchanges, these expanded live practices create spaces of communal experimentation, places of imaginative possibility where social formations can emerge in shared manners’.

Among the many works, the exhibition includes Marina Abramović and Ulay’s seminal performative experiments exploring the embeddedness of the spiritual in the bodily, which were originally presented in 1983 at the Ateneum Art Museum as a part of the ‘ARS83’ exhibition. A few black-and-white documentation photographs in our archives witness the event, and one of those is presented in the current version of the ARS22 exhibition, creating a historical link to live art practices in the show. It is fascinating to recognise that a world famous artist, like Abramović, has a history from her early days in Helsinki.

The Ateneum in its early days also ran an art school next to the museum collection in the same premises. And so the presence of naked bodies, in the anatomy classes and croquis drawing sessions, had a history in the very same gallery spaces as today’s museum. Now this early history of bodies has been researched by Laura Nissinen via the 19th-century anatomy drawings in the Finnish National Gallery’s Collections. In her article, which is the result of her internship at the Finnish National Gallery Nissinen follows different layers of bodily presentations, representations and enactments in art teaching via copies of master sculptures produced in plaster, archive materials such as photographs and drawing manuals, collections of drawings and sketches. ‘Common to the philosophical and artistic bodies is that they are both representations that reflect the thinking, skill, and aesthetic sensibility of their creator. […] The bodily representations are mirrors of humanity, expressing the values of different cultures and eras.’

The body of a painting can be studied in different ways. In this issue, Hanne Tikkala’s peer-reviewed article analyses the colour palettes and colour schemes used by two internationally renowned Finnish artists, Helene Schjerfbeck and Akseli Gallen-Kallela. Tikkala identifies and compares the contents of their pigment palettes using energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectrometry and polarised light microscopy. Shades of pigments like iron-based oranges and reds, chromium or Indian yellows and Prussian blues will appear differently via those devices and methods. Schjerfbeck and Gallen-Kallela were working at a time when new artificial pigments and colours started to replace some of the classical earth pigments. Gallen-Kallela’s travels were even possible to follow by studying more closely the pigments used and their availability at the time.

This year’s second FNG research intern Hilla Männikkö has touched in her article on the special characteristics shared by the miniatures in Paul and Fanny Sinebrychoffs’ Art Collection. These portable and intimate paintings were in their day both material and social objects, which could also be appreciated through the sense of touch. As the author highlights: ‘…especially when considering a miniature, it is important to see its tangible nature. They are not consumed solely by the eye. The connection with a miniature and its subject emerges also with touch: the size and shape are usually well fitted into the hand, which can hold it tight, lift it to be kissed or stroke its smooth surface gently.’ In our times, the closest we can get to these minute paintings is by viewing them in a display case or by exploring the digitised images, which also give access to the reverse side of the paintings that might contain personal notes, or even memorabilia.

Along with an artwork’s material existence is always the presentation of it, the framing and displaying, which are linked to the episteme of the time – the context, discourses and cultural climate, which create the surroundings for works of art. These aspects are consciously highlighted in gallery texts, academic papers and in a way how different artists and objects are curated together.

This issue’s curatorial discussion between Gill Crabbe and curator Claudia de Brün focuses on the ‘Linnaeus: Glimpses of Paradise’ exhibition, which touches on the flora and garden of art treasures at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum. It’s time to enjoy the natural beauty around us and if you wish to intensify your floral experiences and deepen the understanding of the subject matter, you are welcome to admire the flower paintings inside the museum surrounded by its garden of delights.

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Featured image: The reverse of Domenico Bossi’s portrait miniature Mayor Nelander, 5.5cm x 5.5cm. Sinebrychoff Collection, Finnish National Gallery / Sinebrychoff Art Museum
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Simo Karisalo

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

 

11 March 2022

 

The Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, one of the Finnish National Gallery’s three museums, closed its doors for more than a year in order to carry out renovation work to the building. During this period the museum staff were busy focusing on curating an extensive exhibition of international contemporary art ‘ARS22 – Living encounters’, which opens in April.

This exceptional period offered Kiasma a rare opportunity to concentrate on its collections. One result is the publication of a richly illustrated book, The Many Forms of Contemporary Art, which celebrates 30 years of collecting contemporary art. The current issue of FNG Research magazine publishes online two articles from the book, as well as an interview with the curators responsible for the book project. From a research point of view there was a specific chance for the curators to follow their own research interests and to avoid using the standard ways of looking at the collection, instead roaming freely through it.

Since 2017 the Finnish National Gallery has run a research intern programme to foster collaboration between the museum professionals and academic studies in art history. Interns have been recruited to work for three months on a selected part of our collections, honing their skills in researching chosen topics by studying material collection objects, such as specific artists’ archives. In this way we wish to support future museum professionals’ practical enthusiasm for actual physical objects in the collections in their many formats. This programme has proved to be successful both for graduate-level students and the museum’s professionals practising research.

Our research intern for the autumn period in 2021, Ida Pakarinen, chose to look at the collections from the viewpoint of current climate change. Through the artists’ works she chose to examine, her article, ‘Recycled Utopia – Where Art and Everyday Life Coalesce’, touches upon important questions concerning a museum’s collections management in the form of contextualising collections objects with metadata. Focusing on recycled materials and their status in artworks and artists’ working processes, she came to discuss certain key words or concepts, such as ‘trash’, ‘waste’ or ‘junk’, as part of the contextualisation of collection objects. Her approach makes visible how, for example, vocabularies used in cataloguing museum collections are entangled with transforming meanings and values.

An important international research project that FNG Research is currently following is entitled ‘Gothic Modern: from Medieval and Northern Renaissance to Dark, Emotive, Uncanny Modern Art’. The project schedule stretches from 2018 to 2025 and explores the pivotal importance of Gothic art for the artistic modernisms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In this issue, we follow the international partners group meeting and encounter modern Gothic throwbacks in Finnish cultural history.

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Featured image: The Ateneum Research Library
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Jenni Nurminen

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Kirsi Eskelinen, PhD, Museum Director, Finnish National Gallery / Sinebrychoff Art Museum

 

19 November 2021

 

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The Finnish National Gallery recognises the importance of celebrating key moments in its cultural history. This year marks the centenary jubilee of the donation of Paul and Fanny Sinebrychoff Art Collection to the Finnish State. And next spring the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma celebrates the 10th edition of one of the most important shows in its calendar, ARS22, marking 60 years of ARS exhibitions that take the temperature of the contemporary art world.

The Sinebrychoffs’ house museum was opened to the public for the first time on 27 November 1921. At the opening ceremony, the art collection was presented to the political leadership of the young republic. Those in attendance included the President of the Republic and his wife, all of the cabinet ministers, and civil servants from the church and education ministries. The donation was reported widely in the Press. In a newly independent Finland it was a unique and exceptionally grand collection of old European art. The leading art experts of the time praised its artistic level, particularly in terms of the artworks.

The Sinebrychoffs’ house on Bulevardi has seen many changes in the past century. The same can be said of the house museum that it became. The building was last renovated extensively at the end of the 1990s, including a restoration of the rooms on the Bulevardi side to their appearance at the time of the Sinebrychoffs. Black-and-white photographs of the rooms taken by Signe Brander in 1912 made this reconstruction possible. The photographs were used to place the furniture and artworks in the locations they had occupied during the Sinebrychoffs’ lifetimes. The house museum as we know it today opened its doors in early 2003.

The Sinebrychoff Art Museum celebrates the 100th anniversary of the donation with a jubilee publication, which throws light on the house museum as a whole. Paul and Fanny Sinebrychoff decorated the rooms on the Bulevardi side of the building in a range of styles. A great deal of Paul Sinebrychoff’s correspondence has been preserved regarding the purchases for the collection, which allows us to envision the planned, long-term process that shaped it. The Sinebrychoffs were very informed about the collection trends and interior decoration fashions of the time, which is visible in many ways in their collection.

The jubilee publication A Bulevardi Home – Art Collectors Paul and Fanny Sinebrychoff, includes a collection of scholarly articles. Kari-Paavo Kokki’s essay places Paul and Fanny Sinebrychoff’s house museum in a European context. He examines the possible influences on the rooms, which were decorated in a variety of styles, in relation to contemporary fashion and style trends, but above all, he focuses on individual artefacts and furniture and their details. FNG Research also publishes an interview with him in this issue. Here too we republish another essay from the book, by Reetta Kuojärvi-Närhi, MA, a curator at the Finnish National Gallery, which approaches the collection through the couple’s travels in the 1880s and 1890s, based on Paul Sinebrychoff’s correspondence archive.

Also in the jubilee publication Professor Charlotta Wolff examines Paul and Fanny Sinebrychoff’s collection and art collecting in the frame of reference of late 19th-century Finland. Prof. Wolff visualises the collection itself and its special traits as an expression of its time. Chief Curator of the Sinebrychoff Art Museum Ira Westergård, PhD, delves into the donation of the art collection, and particularly Fanny Sinebrychoff’s role in the donation process, as well as the history of the collection after the donation as far as the outbreak of the Winter War at the end of the 1930s.

The jubilee celebration also marks the inauguration of the renewed display of the permanent collection at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum. Many of the acquisitions made during the past seven years are on show, including recently acquired paintings by Jacopo Bassano, Giorgio Gandini del Grano, Abraham Bloemaert, Salvator Rosa and Henry Raeburn among others. The Friends of the Sinebrychoff Art Museum celebrate their 10th anniversary of activity and all 22 artworks that have been donated by them are on show for this occasion.

As part of the Finnish National Gallery’s international research and exhibition project ‘Gothic Modern’, this issue of FNG Research includes a presentation given earlier this year to the project’s first knowledge sharing workshop. Dr Jeremy Howard’s abstract highlights the influence of the Gothic on Russian art and culture through exploring the metaphor of the vault.

An article by Katariina Johde and Hanne Tikkala explores new approaches to conservation work that they have carried out at the Finnish National Gallery’s Conservation Unit. They highlight the value of research that combines extended observations using the naked eye together with the latest technology in assessing the condition of the much-loved painting by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Lake View (1901).

Also in this issue of FNG Research, Saara Hacklin, PhD, curator at Kiasma, follows the work of five printmakers, all alumnae of the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, to explore how the relationship to the human body is manifested in their artworks.

Feeling the pulse of the contemporary art world locally and internationally has been the remit of the ARS exhibitions, which every five years have presented an overview in their thematic shows. Ahead of the 10th edition, ARS22, opening in April at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Gill Crabbe interviews Museum Director Leevi Haapala and Chief Curator João Laia about the research and curation processes involved in creating this landmark exhibition.

Finally, I would like to draw your attention to our annual call for research interns for 2022. Applications will be taken until 31 December 2021, and two interns selected by 21 January 2022. Details of how to apply are in this issue.

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Featured image: Paul Sinebrychoff and Fanny Grahn, when they were engaged to be married, 1883. Photographer: Johannes Jaeger. Collection of Archived Photo Prints. Archive Collections, Finnish National Gallery

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Marja Sakari, PhD, Museum Director, Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum

 

31 May 2021

 

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This edition of FNG Research is looking to the past, present and future. The future is opened up in two major research projects – ‘Gothic Modern’ and ‘Pioneering women artists’. The two initiators of the Gothic Modern project, Chief Curator, Dr Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff, from the Ateneum Art Museum and Dr Juliet Simpson, Professor of Art History at Coventry University, are spearheading an international endeavour to rethink the development of a specifically Nordic Modernism at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, having its inspiration in the northern Gothic and Renaissance. The project is concentrating on illuminating the Gothic as a core fascination for late 19th- and early 20th-century art that crossed cultural borders, transcended nationalism and straddled war and its aftermath. The sources of inspiration for artists of that time can be traced to some exhibitions and to specific artists, such as Lucas Cranach and Hans Holbein.

Influences were also a political issue, as shown by Dr Krista Kodres, who in her article sheds light on the Estonian historiographical undertones shaping the understanding of Gothic art and architecture in Estonia. In her article, which is an extended abstract of her lecture given at the Gothic Modern knowledge sharing workshop in March of this year, she is asking how in different periods art-historical writing has formulated the understanding of cultural heritage. The basic question she asks is whether the artistic results of medieval and Renaissance art were nationally unique, or were they just copying the ‘trend-setting centres’, located mainly in German cities. The aim of some local art historians in Estonia was to demonstrate that the Baltic-Nordic region created its own independent art forms, an idea that challenged the view that Hanseatic German art was the predominant influence in this region.

Dr Anne-Maria Pennonen presents the recently launched international research project concerning women artists in the mid-19th century from Finland, Nordic and Baltic countries and Germany. What were the routes of inspiration for these artists, where did they study and what kind of networks did they form during their years of study?

In this issue we also present the results of a three-month research internship at the Finnish National Gallery undertaken by MA student Emmi Halmesvirta, who examines a much more recent artist, namely Juhana Blomstedt (1937–2010). Halmesvirta took as her starting point the archive material and sketches in the Finnish National Gallery collection related to Juhana Blomstedt’s career in the period 1970–80. Blomstedt’s art-theoretical thinking during the 1970s seems to revolve around questions of form, content, expression, abstraction, subjectivity, truth and optics. In his art he was somehow distancing himself from the high modernist demand for purity, even if his art could be categorised as being part of the constructivist tradition.

The Director of the Sinebrychoff Art Museum Kirsi Eskelinen writes about the provenance of a painting by Jacopo Bassano (c. 1510–92), Virgin and Child with John the Baptist and St Anthony the Abbot, which is housed in the museum’s collection. It is a republication of her article from 1992 but in connection with it, we are for the first time publishing images of the details on the back of the frame moulding. These give some important clues about the provenance of the artwork. The Museum has plans for a monographic exhibition on Jacopo Bassano in the near future, which makes it even more relevant to republish and expand on this article.

Two articles in this issue are focusing on the current exhibition of Ilya Repin at the Ateneum Art Museum: Chief Curator Timo Huusko’s essay on the Russian artist’s relationship to Finland, and an updated article by curator Helena Hätönen on the archival material related to Repin in the Archive Collections of the Finnish National Gallery, first published in the catalogue of the Kadriorg Art Museum’s Repin exhibition which took place in Tallinn in 2013.

The Ateneum Art Museum’s curators Hanne Selkokari and Anu Utriainen have been interviewed in connection with the exhibition ‘Among Forests and Lakes: Landscape Masterpieces from the Finnish National Gallery’, which is now on display at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle.

Dr Harri Kalha’s interview in this issue is connected with the exhibition of Magnus Enckell, which unfortunately had to be closed just a few weeks after its opening in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Fortunately, this exhibition is continuing in the Tampere Art Museum in a slightly smaller version this autumn.

I hope you will enjoy these diverse articles from different sectors of art history.

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Featured image: Ilya Repin, Double Portrait of Natalia Nordmann and Ilya Repin, 1903, oil on canvas, 78.5cm x 130cm. Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Jenny Nurminen

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Read more — Download FNG Research No. 2/2021 as a PDF

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

 

23 January 2021

 

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We are beginning 2021 by publishing a second series of articles on the life and work of the Finnish painter Magnus Enckell (1870–1929). These articles were first published in the exhibition catalogue of Enckell’s monographic exhibition in October 2020.

A focal trait in Enckell’s art was his continued interest in classical European mythology, from his early output up to his very late works. Mythological themes offered him a way to align with the early modern Symbolist movement and its radical ideas in Paris in the early 1890s. These themes also served as a vehicle for the emotional transference he sought in his artistic practice along the lines of the emerging theories in modern psychology and art theory of the period. A fresh look at Enckell’s paintings has also revealed new links between his Neo-impressionist period from the early 1910s and European vitalist philosophy.

A major outcome of the Magnus Enckell research project is the publication of a separate illustrated catalogue of the artist’s paintings and graphic works, which is intended particularly as a future resource for the art-historical research community. A survey was conducted simultaneously with the exhibition project among Finnish museums, foundations and institutions that elicited information about several works in private collections that could be included as well. The catalogue refers to and complements to an extent a constitutive biography and catalogue raisonné of Enckell’s art by Dr Jaakko Puokka, published in 1949. Our new catalogue is available only online.

Accomplished artist women from Finnish art history have raised continuing interest internationally and some, such as the painter Helene Schjerfbeck, have been presented in solo exhibitions and gradually included in the canon of modern European art. However, the matter of looking more thoroughly than previously into women’s contribution in art is by no means complete. On the contrary, the results of an intensified investment in researching, for example the limiting conditions faced by women artists on their way to a more or less recognised artistic career, are yet to be seen. Now the Ateneum Art Museum, as part of the Finnish National Gallery, is participating in a groundbreaking project in co-operation with the national galleries of Sweden (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) and Norway (National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo) to shed new light and share innovative approaches to Nordic women sculptors between 1870 and 1940.

Last but not least, we are delighted to announce that the Finnish National Gallery’s successful research intern programme is continuing in 2021. Two research interns have been selected to work for a three-month period to investigate their chosen areas of the Finnish National Gallery’s collections. By investing annually in the programme we wish to encourage interest in our collections and support students who choose to study subjects based on physical collections and objects, archive material and data. During the past four years, this format of interaction between experienced museum professionals and masters-level students has created a bridge between museums and academia in a most fruitful and gratifying way.

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Featured image: Venny Soldan-Brofeldt, Portrait of Sigrid af Forselles, 1902, oil on hardboard, 37cm x 35cm, Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Hannu Aaltonen

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

 

27 November 2020

 

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This autumn all three museums of the Finnish National Gallery have been a hive of activity. New shows have been opened and our audiences have received their exhibition programmes with enthusiasm. This is most rewarding after the Covid-19 lockdown earlier this year. It underlines the relevance of long-term and focussed art-history based research, which is the steady cornerstone of our exhibition programmes. Our current programme opens new horizons in looking at both Finnish and Italian art.

In this issue of FNG Research magazine we publish four articles that first appeared earlier this autumn in the context of a monographic exhibition of the artist Magnus Enckell (1870–1925) at the Ateneum Art Museum. Enckell was one of the key figures during the period when Finnish artists were being influenced by Symbolist phenomena in Paris during the early 1890s. Some 20 years later, Enckell was considered to be one of the first to lead Finnish painters towards a notable strand of Neo-Impressionism.

Comprehensive exhibitions of Enckell’s work have been rare in recent decades, but both the man and his art have been a constant source of interest to Finnish critics and art historians since his death. Enckell has been considered an enigmatic and rather inaccessible person. In the late 1900s and early 2000s, one reason for this was revealed in the art-historical studies undertaken by Harri Kalha, as well as Juha-Heikki Tihinen. Kalha’s article in the current exhibition catalogue, based on his extensive monographic study from 2005, discusses the discursive strategies of veiling and unveiling Enckell’s covert homosexuality, which seemingly created a deliberately enigmatic and rather inaccessible aura around Enckell’s person. Marja Lahelma sheds light on Enckell’s work after the turn of the 20th century from the perspective of the philosophical and health-promoting aspects of vitalism. The theme of plein air and marine landscape in relation to Enckell’s art is discussed by Anne-Maria Pennonen. And a new approach towards the artist’s late career is outlined by Marja Sakari, one of the exhibition’s curators.

For the first time ever in Finland, the Sinebrychoff Art Museum brings together more than 20 oil paintings, in addition to drawings and etchings, by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and his son Domenico. The exhibition includes a significant tranche of drawings by the Tiepolos from The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, whose leading Tiepolo expert, Dr Irina Artemieva, is interviewed in this issue. According to Dr Artemieva, the very subject of the exhibition, Tiepolo’s art in Northern Europe, is already new and offers a fresh approach to the study of these great Venetian masters. The show, and the research associated with the exhibition that is published in an accompanying catalogue, is set to stimulate justified interest and surprises among Tiepolo specialists internationally.

FNG Research magazine, together with the Ateneum Art Museum, the Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma and the Sinebrychoff Art Museum, wishes readers and collaborators inspiring and thought-provoking discoveries in our latest issue.

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Featured image: Magnus Enckell, a page from a sketch book, 1912, probably showing the Variety Theatre Bal Tabar in Paris, pencil on paper, Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Jenni Nurminen

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