Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931).
A Passion for Finland

Chronology

Axel Gallèn à Konginkagas© DR

1865: Axel Waldemar Gallén is born in Pori, on the west coast of the Grand Duchy of Finland. At the time, this country was part of the Russian Empire.
1876: Gallén enters the Swedish language grammar school in Helsinki, the capital of the Grand Duchy. He takes evening classes in drawing.
1881: At the age of 16, he leaves school and devotes himself to art.
1884: In the autumn, he leaves Finland for Paris.
1890: Marries Mary Helena Slöör. Honeymoon in Karelia
1893: Gallén supports the cause of the Young Finns, a movement that set out to strengthen the cultural identity of Finland.
1895: Stays in Berlin, where he is well known in avant-garde circles. The sudden death of his daughter brings him back to Finland. In the summer, he moves to Ruovesi, where he has a combined house and studio built.
1898: Trip to Italy.
1900: Presentation of Gallén's works in the Finnish pavilion at the Universal Exhibition in Paris.
1905: Gallén joins Finnish passive resistance to Russian oppression.
1907: The artist officially adopts the name Akseli Gallen-Kallela, a Finnish sounding name.
1909-1910: Trip to Equatorial Africa.
1917: Finland gains Independence. Gallen-Kallela takes part in the ensuing civil war in the ranks of the "Whites", led by General Carl Gustav Mannerheim.
1923-1926: Trip to the United States.
1928: Decorates the cupola inside the National Museum in Helsinki.
1931: Gallen-Kallela dies of pneumonia in Stockholm.

Peasants and rural life

Akseli Gallen-KallelaThe Old Woman and the Cat© Turku Art Museum / Photo Vesa Aaltonen

At the beginning of his career, Axel Gallén specialised in subjects from country life. He knew this life well as he had spent his childhood in Tyrvää, a rural area in the west of Finland. Painted in 1884 in Tyrvää, Boy and a Crow shows the influence of the French Naturalist painter Jules Bastien-Lepage. In Old Woman and Cat, painted in 1885, Gallén depicts the peasant woman with gnarled features, and her body misshapen by hard physical toil.

Between 1886 and 1889, while staying at Keuruu in central Finland, Gallén softened his style and his subjects: he painted interiors with chiaroscuro reminiscent of Rembrandt. He depicted scenes that were typically Finnish: the ritual of the sauna, the family gathering in the living room with rye bread drying above. The characters are simple and dignified. From 1890, he took the wild landscapes of Karelia as the subject for large decorations: these express a feeling of Man being at one with Nature.

Paris

Akseli Gallen-KallelaUnmasked© Finnish National Gallery / Central Art Archives / Photo Pirje Mykkänen

Between autumn 1884 and late spring 1889, Axel Gallén made three trips to Paris, returning to Finland between each. On arrival, he would move to Batignolles and study at the Académie Julian, with William Bouguereau and Tony Robert Fleury. In 1887, he enrolled at the studio of Fernand Cormon whose history painting he very much admired. During all these stays, he suffered from homesickness, even though he had a large circle of friends. His closest friends, like August Strindberg, were Nordic.

In Paris, Gallén practised life drawing. He painted street scenes and café scenes, such as Boulevard in Paris. He did interior scenes: in Unmasked, he depicted a nude prostitute, seated on a sofa wrapped in a ryijy, a textile typical of Finnish popular art. He also painted a self-portrait and other portraits, including his friend the Norwegian artist, Carl Adam Dørnberger. He took part in the Salon de la Société des artistes français in 1886, 1888 and 1889.

Portraits

Akseli Gallen-KallelaPortrait of the Actress Ida Aalberg© Photo Studio Tomi Aho

Axel Gallén's portraits provide pictorial evidence of high society in the Grand Duchy of Finland. Antti Ahlström, pictured with his family in his sitting room, and Gustav Serlachius, standing proudly in the middle of his factory, were the captains of industry of modern Finland. Ahlström was a ship owner who invested in sawmills, and a patron of Finnish culture. Serlachius had started off in the paper pulping industry.

Edvard Neovius was a professor of mathematics and also a senator. In the family portrait Gallén painted in1886, the professor sits in the shadow, and his daughter Saima, who is playing the piano, is bathed in light.

Ida Aalberg was a very famous actress in the Finnish theatre. With her anxious expression and her long hands clasped together, she really looks like a tortured diva. Finally, the artist's Naturalist portrait of his young wife Mary Gallén shows her in all the elegant finery of a wealthy lady who is in tune with the primitive natural world.

Landscapes

Akseli Gallen-KallelaThe Great Black Woodpecker© Collection particulière

In June 1889, Gallén went to Keuruu in central Finland, with his friend Louis Sparre. He painted several landscapes there, using a brilliant blue to highlight Lake Jamajärvi, and taking great care to reproduce the golden brown reflections of the birches.

During the summer of 1892, he painted the legendary land of Karelia in The Great Black Woodpecker, a painting in which the bird seems to breathe life into the natural setting around it. In Mäntykoski Waterfall, Gallén brings together a realistic representation of the waterfall and an abstract element: five golden strings that divide the painting vertically suggesting a musical echo to the cascading water. The location Imatra with is spectacular waterfalls, was already a tourist attraction; Gallén turns it into an icon of the Finnish countryside.

The artist also produced numerous paintings in the region of Ruovesi, in the west of Finland. From 1902, influenced by the German movements Phalanx, and later Die Brücke, Gallén's landscapes were full of shimmering colours and became highly stylised.

Symbolism

Akseli Gallen-KallelaSymposium© Collection particulière / Photo Jani Kuusenaho / Tampere Art Museum

Between 1893-1894, Gallén produced a series of works that belong to the European Symbolist movement. They were inspired by scenes from the Bible or the great Creation stories. Theosophy and Occultism influenced Gallén: he visited the first Rosicrucian Salon in Paris in 1892.

The symbols he introduces have a mystic and initiatory dimension. In Ad Astra, Gallén puts forward his own vision of the Bible's theme of the resurrection that he interprets as a process of liberation that follows human suffering. In Symposium, two men sitting at a table stare at a strange apparition above the table, situated outside the painting. The standing figure, dressed in black, is the artist himself. The two men are Robert Kajanus and Jean Sibelius, Finnish composers. The fleeting apparition that they are looking at symbolises the mystery of art, which the sleeping figure cannot see or understand.

The Kalevala

Akseli Gallen-KallelaLemminkaïnen's Mother© Finnish National Gallery / Central Art Archives. Photo Jouko Könönen

The Kalevala is an epic poem based on ancient Finnish poetry, written by Elias Lönnrot in the 1830s. He wrote the Kalevala after going out into the countryside to collect examples of traditional oral folklore from bards who could still recite and sing these poems. When the Kalevala was first published in 1835, it aroused great interest. Lönnrot's work became the symbol of national identity.

Axel Gallén captured all the visual majesty of the Kalevala's magical and heroic themes. Initially, he employs a Naturalist style for The Legend of Aino and The Forging of the Sampo. But for the heroes Väinämöinen and Lemminkäinen, who are endowed with supernatural powers, he found a new style full of extravagant colours and stylised decorations. In The Defence of the Sampo, we witness a struggle to win a magic object, which will bring its owner power and wealth: the Sampo. In Lemminkäinen's Mother, she is about to bring her son back to life after finding him hacked to pieces in the river of the dead, the Tuonela.

The Juselius Mausoleum

Akseli Gallen-KallelaSpring© Finnish National Gallery / Central Art Archives / Photo Hannu Aaltonen

In 1898, tragedy struck Arthur Juselius, who lived in Pori: his only daughter Sigrid died at the age of 11. He decided to build a mausoleum for her. It was designed by Josef Stenbäck in a neo-Gothic style. Juselius wanted the interior to be magnificently decorated. The main part of the iconographic programme was entrusted to Gallén. In 1902, he did numerous preparatory studies for fresco paintings. Destroyed by fire, they were restored in 1930 by Jorma Gallen-Kallela.

In his frescoes, Gallén depicted the cycle of life and death, taking the theme of its close relationship with the rhythm of the seasons, from a metaphysical point of view. In Spring, a woman in a black dress, the symbol of death, threatens the simple happiness of the children. Death also hovers in Construction : the woman is giving her older child the milk that was intended for her dead newborn. The river Tuonela, the river of the dead in the Kalevala, mercilessly carries away the living, in their despair.

Decorative arts

Gallén's interest in the decorative arts began in 1894-1895, when he built Kalela, his combined house and studio. He even decided to design the furnishings himself. He made wooden furniture in sturdy, rectilinear shapes. Vain attempts were made to discover the inspiration for these pieces in Finnish folklore. In fact they have a rustic feel to them that gives them a stylistic link with certain trends in European Art Nouveau. The sideboard made in 1897 has a carved decoration symbolising the tree of knowledge.

In 1897 Louis Sparre, a friend that Gallén had met in 1887 at the Académie Julian, set up Iris, the decorative arts factory based on the model of William Morris' commercial venture in London. It was Sparre who asked Gallén to design the Iris room in the Finnish pavilion at the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris. Ceramics by Alfred William Finch, who was influenced by the Art Nouveau production in Belgium, were also presented in the pavilion.

Total art

At the end of the 19th century, many European artists, like Carl Larsson in Sweden, moved to remote places, far from any towns. They built houses to their own design, and also designed the interiors and the furniture. This was Gallén's approach in 1894-1895 for his house and studio Kalela, constructed with pine logs, according to his own plans, and using traditional building techniques. Gallén also made the furniture for Kalela himself.

In 1900, he designed the Iris room in the Finnish pavilion at the Universal Exhibition in Paris. The restrained elegance of the furniture set it apart from Primitivism. Gallén also created a textile work called a ryijy in Finnish: the ryijy Flame, evoking both the world of plants - ferns - and fire. The Iris room marks the birth of Finnish art in the international arena. The ryijy Flame became one of the earliest examples of Finnish design.

Africa

From 1902, Gallén was in close contact with the German avant-garde, which would soon lead to Expressionism. He was deeply affected by the political situation in Finland: in 1908, the Russian authorities dissolved the Finnish Parliament which had been elected by universal suffrage for the first time in 1907, the same year that Gallén took the Finnish name of Gallen-Kallela. The painting that shows him skiing with his son in the winter of 1909, clearly expresses this tension.

The artist moved to Paris, but an irresistible force made him go further afield, to Africa, in search of unspoiled lands and peoples. In May 1909, he set out from Marseille with his wife and two children for British East Africa (present-day Kenya) where they would spend the next 16 months. During his stay, Gallén lived in camps, went on safaris, joined hunting trips and collected ethnographic artefacts. He joined an expedition to Mount Kenya, and made contact with the people of this region. He brought back an impressive body of work from this trip.

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Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931).A Passion for Finland