reviewed by Bart Beaty and Rebecca Sullivan, University of Calgary
Photos are by the reviewers except for Bird Blue (detail) which is from the Museum's website.
It
is all but impossible for visitors to Helsinki to avoid the influence of Tove
Jansson. A Moomin shop occupies a prominent location in the airport, while two
competing Moomin shops can be found in close proximity to the central train
station. Moomin figures can be found in bakeries and candy shops and
bookstores. The Moomins can be found peddling chocolate-filled peppermint
candies, organic oat snacks, coffee mugs, cutting boards, can openers, stuffed
toys, t-shirts, and wool socks. They are everywhere and they are on everything.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, they were also in HAM Helsinki Art Museum.
From
October 25, 2024 to April 6, 2025, the top two floors of Helsinki’s primary art
space were given over to Tove Jansson: Paradise. Billed as an in-depth
look at Jansson’s public paintings, the show included a large number of
Jansson’s pre-Moomin paintings from the 1930s and 1940s while focusing
extensively on her career as a muralist.
Jansson’s
first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, was originally
published in 1945 to no great success. Prior to that time, Jansson, the
daughter of a sculptor father and an illustrator mother, spent most of the
1930s in a succession of art schools in Stockholm, Helsinki, and Paris.
Following in the footsteps of her mother, she published illustrations in Garm,
a Finnish-Swedish satirical magazine from 1929 to 1953 while, at the same time,
exhibiting paintings in group shows. Jansson’s first solo painting exhibition
took place in 1943, two years before the first Moomin book was published. Two
years later, she painted her first mural at the Strömberg factory in
Pitäjänmäki, Helsinki. Tove Jansson: Paradise is interested in combining
all of these aspects of her career: the paintings from her student period
through her early professionalization, her career as a muralist working in
public spaces, and the early years and then rapid success of the Moomin books
and comics.
Jansson’s
first two solo shows were arranged by Leonard Bäcksbacka at his Konstalongen
gallery 1943. The successful first show provided a boost for the young artist,
but the second solo exhibition in 1946 was not well received by either critics
or art patrons. The first several galleries of the exhibitions are given over
to a selection of her paintings as well as the contemporaneous illustration
work for Garm. Jansson’s paintings of this period are not immediately
recognizable as the work of the Moomin author but demonstrate a strong
influence of mid-century European modernism with their thick brushstrokes and
moody palette, while the illustration work – often topical and political –
shows stronger traces of the material that will develop in her children’s books.
Following
the display of her early easel paintings, the final room on the first floor of
the exhibition hosts two large frescoes as well as studies for the same.
Commissioned in 1947 by the restaurant in the basement of the Helsinki City
Hall, the two painting are titled Party in the Countryside and Party
in the City. These works begin to synthesize Jansson’s modernist and
folklorist aesthetics, providing a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of an
artist determined to become a critical and commercial success.
Party
in the Countryside
depicts eight figures frolicking in lush vegetation. The images are cartoony in
their representational simplicity and subtle pastel colour scheme - an abrupt departure
from the tone and style of her paintings following the unsuccessful second show.
The city scene is no less luxurious, depicting couples in gowns and evening
wear dancing on a flower strewn balcony.
The
two works, the artist’s first attempts at frescoes, participated in the massive
post-war reconstruction effort across Finland that provided unprecedented
opportunities for young artists. Jansson, who came from a well-connected family
of artists, benefitted tremendously (one might even leave thinking overtly) from
this social and political network.
The
only public commission known to have been awarded to Jansson on a competitive
basis was the Aurora Hospital murals intended for the new children’s ward.
Alone among the murals on display, these clearly capitalized on her growing
fame from the Moomin series. Play, painted in 1956, presented a series
of Moomin characters in the stairwell and the EEG room of the hospital. It was later
recreated at the Helsinki University Central Hospital when the pediatric ward
was relocated in 1997. At HAM, the mural was recreated once again on the
central staircase leading visitors from the first floor of the exhibition to
the second.
The
second floor of the exhibition was much more impressive than the first. A vast
open space with vaulted ceilings broken up by temporary dividers, this floor
showcased the immensity of the murals. Display cases of her sketches and highly
detailed notebooks invited viewers to contemplate the artist’s process. Jansson
typically produced preliminary sketches on paper and then worked through colour
schemes on cardboard before concluding with a 1:1 charcoal tracing that would
be transferred to the wall. Examples of each of these stages were on full
display here (most impressively the enormous cartoon of The Ten Virgins
with its pinpricks for the charcoal transfer readily apparent).
 |
| Bird Blue, 1953 (detail). © Tove Jansson Estate. Photo: HAM / Maija Toivanen. |
Throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, Jansson produced public art for restaurants, hotels, several schools, the Nordic Union Bank and an altar piece for the Teuva Church in Southern Ostrobothnia. She worked in fresco, fresco-secco (pigment applied to dry plaster), watercolour on glass, and oil on canvas. Over time, these works increasingly came to resemble work for which she is best known, and even to incorporate elements of the Moomin universe at the margins.
As
Canadians of a certain generation most of the waves of Moomin-mania missed us,
so we have no sentimental attachment to Jansson’s work. This turned out to be a
benefit as the exhibition is not about the Moomins really but about the artist
behind the phenomenon. There was no hiding Jansson’s sexuality, her sometimes
craven ambition, and her canny working of her socially powerful contacts in
both government and the art world. While Moomin die-hards might come away mildly
disappointed, the casual visitor gained incredible insight into
mid-twentieth-century Finland as it sought to distance itself from its complex
wartime status into an independent nation with its own distinct visual culture.
And, for those die-hards, there are Moomin mugs and mittens in the bookshop.
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| Sketch for the Bird Blue mural, 1953. Commision for the canteen at Kila Swedish-language elementary school (today Karjaa co-educational school). |
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