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| Greta Hällfors-Sipilä: Yö [Night]. 1931, watercolour, 32 x 24,8 cm, Helsinki Art Museum. |
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| Sylvi Kunnas: Valtatiet [Highways], 1928. Book cover art to a collection of poems by the young Turks Mika Waltari and Olavi Paavolainen. |
Here We Come! Women Artists in Early Modernism (exhibition)
Tampere Art Museum, 18th Feb – 28th May 2017
Curator: Riitta Konttinen
Exhibition manager: Tapani Pennanen
Visited on 11 March 2017 with a lecture by Riitta Konttinen.
The book to the exhibition:
Riitta Konttinen: Täältä tullaan! Naistaiteilijat modernin murroksessa. Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Siltala, 2017. Printed: Dardedze Holografija. Hard cover. Fully illustrated. Only in Finnish. 312 p.
Tampere Art Museum: “Women artists appear to be completely absent from the accounts of Finnish art in the early 20th century” notes professor emerita Riitta Konttinen, the curator of the Here We Come! exhibition. Notions of art described as ’modernism’ have been regarded as a male domain. In the early years of Finnish independence, it was also felt that women could not become artists with a message for the nation. Women artists were no longer awarded prizes as they had been at the end of the previous century, they received hardly any grants, and critics did not write about their work.
The Here We Come! exhibition asks why we know only a few Finnish women artists of the early 20th century, such as Helene Schjerfbeck, Ellen Thesleff, Ester Helenius and Sigrid Schauman? The majority of art students, however, were women, many of them becoming professionals in the arts. What was the ‘black hole’ in which they disappeared, and why did this happen?
The women artists of the early 20th century include many interesting and unique artists, such as Elga Sesemann, Helmi Kuusi, Sylvi Kunnas, Greta Hällfors-Sipilä, Ina Colliander, Edith Wiklund, Martta Helminen, Meri Genetz, Inni Siegberg, Eva Törnwall-Collin, Aino von Boehm and Gunvor Grönvik. They would test the boundaries of art, break the boundaries of form, experiment with colour and brushwork, and break up or flatten the visual space. This exhibition also considers, through the works of women artists, the conditions under which they operated in the early 20th century – their relationship with working in the studio, with Paris the city of great hopes, the new ideologies of art, the themes of art, war, the urban lifestyle, religion, family, the status of women and the identity of women artists. Tampere Art Museum
AA: Riitta Konttinen's corpus is huge in research and curatorship of Finnish women artists and artist couples, in recent years including Ragni Cawén, artist couples, and women artists in the 19th century, among others.
The new Tampere Art Museum exhibition curated by her is based on remarkable detective work exposing systematic neglect of female artists from the early 1910s till the 1940s and offering a strong starting point for rediscovery. Entire forgotten oeuvres are being found in attics and cellars.
Established masters such as Helene Schjerfbeck, Ellen Thesleff, and Sigrid Schauman have been always appreciated, but even such distinguished veterans had to fight against discrimination in the male dominated art world.
The way to start in the Tampere exhibition is to examine the self-portrait gallery of the artists at the entrance to the main floor. There are many portraits, including several of Elga Sesemann (who also figures on the poster and the book cover). Nobody is smiling.
Their looks are accusing.
This portrait gallery is a coup of curatorship. It also puts into perspective the most famous set of self-portraits in Finnish art history, the one by Helene Schjerfbeck. The saga of her changing face is also a record of oppression. Schjerfbeck's paintings now command seven figures in auctions, but she lived her life in poverty.
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| Helmi Kuusi: Tulitikkutyttö [The Little Match Girl], 1937, dry point, 16 x 15 cm. Kansallisgalleria, Ateneumin Taidemuseo. Helsinki. |
Neglected artists on display include Elga Sesemann, Meri Genetz, Inni Siegberg, Helmi Kuusi, and Ina Colliander. But even from the established masters there are works here that are not among the best-known.
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| Greta Hällfors-Sipilä: Halle pelaa shakkia Wreden kanssa [Halle Plays Chess with Wrede], 1922, watercolour, 25,5 x 22,7 cm. Photo : Jari Kuusenaho / Tampereen taidemuseo. |
A special favourite of mine is Greta Hällfors-Sipilä. Her works are figurative but she plays with perspective, indulges in touches of naivism, and adds a touch of surprise and humour, discovering something new in the ordinary, very often, like her husband Sulho Sipilä, painting over again the most familiar vicinity of her home on Laivurinrinne in Helsinki, facing St. John's Church and the nearby skating rink, near the Five Corners.
The exhibition is a revelation in itself, and it includes smaller revelations, such as Ester Helenius's portrait of the young Hella Wuolijoki from the year 1905, thirty years before she became a grande dame of the Finnish theatre as a playwright (and also a major figure in Finnish cinema with fine film adaptations based on her work directed by Valentin Vaala).
Another delightful detail is to discover in Riitta Konttinen's book an image of the gargoyles on the facade of the Pohjola house by Hilda Flodin from the year 1901. Those gargoyles loom large in Antti Peippo's film Seinien silmät / The Walls Have Eyes (1981) which we screened a week ago. I felt that Peippo may have included those faces in humoristic self-parody. Konttinen remarks that there may have been a caricatured resemblance with potentates of the Finnish art world of the day.
Riitta Konttinen's book to the exhibition is indispensable, an essential achievement in her work-in-progress. At least half of the works appearing in the book's illustrations are not on display in the exhibition.
Tampere Art Museum was crowded on this Saturday afternoon, and there was standing room only for Riitta Konttinen's lecture.
BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: THE PRESS RELEASE BY TAMPERE ART MUSEUM:
