Purity and
function—these evocative terms have almost become synonymous with Finnish design.
In Finland today, there is a tendency to emphasize the internationalism of
Finnish design, and reduced functional forms are often singled out for their
“universal” appeal. The popular and influential modernist rhetoric of
“more beautiful things for everyday use” relates Finland to Scandinavia
and evokes a design culture ennobled by the democratic ideal.
The
“Design in Scandinavia” exhibition, which toured North America from
1954 to 1957, strengthened the image of a common Nordic culture; this was
underscored in 1961 when the Swedish critic Ulf Hård af Segerstad, in his book Scandinavian Design, called the
introduction “Four Countries—One aesthetic Culture.” The fact that
differences are seldom emphasized in discussions of Scandinavian design is
perhaps due to a wariness over nationalist tendencies, but also to the political
and economic interests of the Nordic community. It was more effective to market
the idyllic picture of an unspoiled North as a common culture. Minimizing the
differences was imperative for Finland: by becoming part of the Scandinavian
postwar project to aggressively market design abroad, Finland could benefit
from established Danish and Swedish trading relations. Moreover, a cultural
alliance would help Finland to establish its position on the western side of the
Iron Curtain.
This essay examines Finland’s “design
identity,” focusing on conceptions about
the objects, not on inherent formal qualities of the objects themselves. Most
importantly it considers the prevalent discourses of “Finnishness”
that were so crucial in the creation of a national design culture in the 1940s
and 1950s. Such an analysis reveals the particular role given to Finland in the
context of international design as well as in Nordic culture. It also evokes an
“antinormative” view of modern design, replete with nationalist, romanticist,
even anti-Functionalist overtones, which may seem out of place in a discussion
of modernism. These seemingly anachronistic features are, however, of utmost
relevance to a better understanding of Finnish modern design and more generally
to the cultural and ideological distinctions all too often overlooked in the
history of modernism.
Cultural Difference and Invisible Hierarchies
The Finns have for years
been poor and subservient, neither have they ever had the means to be
traditional in that sense [as the wealthy Swedes], but they have kept their
traditions alive in an indomitably strong and mystically deep soul, their Volksgeist, which under tough living
conditions has given them strength and never lulled them into a sense of
self-satisfaction. Although their color tones and harmonies are nearly all
somber and serious, here and there among the darker tones a more powerful
radiance can be discerned. This is special and strange, far distant from our
gentle Danish palette, yet we seem to recognize it, just as we love it in Finnish
music, in the works Sibelius and the artist Järnefelt have given us. Unending,
sighing spruce forests, uninhabited skerries and deep lakes, the setting sun
glowing on becalmed waters, all this we recognize in these works….
This
characterization of Finnish applied arts written by a Danish critic in 1940, is
telling in its patronizing portrayal of Finnish culture. The review is about
Finnishness: austere conditions and natural landscapes. Design tenets such as
form, function, or methods of production do not figure into this type of
contextualization. Finnish design was successful abroad precisely because of
its Finnishness—its authentic, original, essentially exotic, quality. And this,
in turn, is how the Finns learned and accepted to present their design abroad.
In
writing about Finnish ryijy rugs in
1941, Åke Stavenow, editor of the Swedish design magazine Form, praised the daring compositions, powerful colors, “the mysticism
and fragrances of nature.” He also stressed the suggestive atmosphere,
which “actually had nothing whatever to do with textiles.” A
similar reaction was expressed by Swedish glass and ceramics designer Tyra Lundgren,
who commented that “this Finnish talent for capturing the imagination of a
foreign audience is by no means directly related to objective quality, but it
forces the viewer to internalize his or her own experience.”
These
statements reveal the experiential subjectivity characteristic of the
interpretation of modern Finnish applied arts. The suggestive content of the
works was repeatedly stressed. These few excerpts also show that the critics
were intrigued by a difference they recognized in Finnish design, which caused
them to repeat a preconception of Finnishness in one article after another.
Form and function were clearly not the issue.
The
strong identity of modern Finnish applied arts can be recognized in the
critics’ tendency to draw parallels between design and the fine arts, music,
and poetry. Swedish critics favored references to the national heroes of
Finnish art such as Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Tyko Sallinen, or Wäinö Aaltonen; as
a “color art” ryijy rugs in
particular were frequently compared to the master paintings. These
comparisons reveal conventions in art and design criticism, but they were also strategies
for enhancing the artistic value of the applied arts. The romantic repertoire
of concepts favored by design critics also included religious metaphors. Finns
were presumed to display in their crafts a “religious” outlook
stemming from pantheism and paganism. In a 1946 article published in Denmark,
for example, the sustaining factor in the Finnish applied arts was ascribed to
a “pagan or at least a Gothic view of life.”
In
the 1940s, Lundgren, who was also a critic and essayist, frankly described the
national differences between the Nordic countries. She stressed the pathos and
“primitive instinct to identify with nature” which “is more
clearly noticeable in the Finns than in [the Swedes], because as a race they have only partially been freed
from the natural state.” Lundgren continues:
As a people the Finns
have a unique strength, a primitive artistic drive with which they charge their
work. It is a strange mixture of witchcraft and backwoods melancholy, glowing
colors and gray poverty, paganism, a yearning for beauty and an enduring
strength. Their sense of form does not stem from classical antecedents, nor is
it based on shapes developed by man over the millennia. Their archetype is the
primitive nature around them, forms which could be carved from wood with a puukko knife, dictated by feelings and
instincts alone.
When writing about glassmaking, Lundgren
explained the differences through what she considered to be racial features and
characteristics. She compared the “flaxen-haired, muscular glassblowers
from Småland” at the Swedish glasshouse Kosta to the Finns who,
“despite the docility of their race,”
had shown themselves to be slow and plodding in their work. Finnish glassblowers,
according to Lundgren, lacked intuitive and free expression although,
paradoxically enough, these same features characterized the general Swedish image
of Finnish artist-designers.
The
Scandinavian critics’ choice of words was influenced by a tangle of cultural
stereotypes, the unraveling of which reveals a view of the Nordic ideological
climate as well as the conventions of critical discourse. A German tradition is
reflected in conceptions relating aesthetic subjectivism and Einfühlung with national character. According
to art historian Wilhelm Worringer, for example, art in Northern Europe was characterized
by mysticism and intuition, the “Northern pathos” was due to an
instinct for art that was distinguished from (Italian) classicism. It was characterized
by a yearning for “redemption,” an “ecstatic will to form”
and longing for primitivism. The other Nordic countries in particular
recognized these features in the Finnish applied arts, as they were perhaps nostalgically
looking to Finland for a pristine “authentic Nordicism.” At the same
time, however, the position of the “eastern primitive” in the Nordic
cultural hierarchy was indicated.
In
the 1940s, words such as “painterly” and “colorist” were favored
to identify the work of Finnish designer-craftspeople. As the Scandinavians saw
it, Finns created through instinct, not knowledge. Design reviews speak of a nature-culture
dichotomy in which the untouched or original is differentiated from that
refined by culture or civilization: Finnishness was primitiveness. Finnish designers
represented “a race only partially
freed from the natural state” who “still feel a part of the forest,
earth, moss, grass …” or they were “like children of nature … ignorant of past achievements.” Design in Finland was thus not
conceived as a conscious “form culture” of calculated proportions, instead
it was envisioned as an innocent and childlike play with materials.
There
were also gender connotations in the articulation of Finnish difference: a
virginal “Maiden of Finland” was seen in the objects—unrefined and
irrational (feminine), matter in contrast to form. The very ideal of vitalism that characterized the Finnish
applied arts was metaphorically feminine, an “imitation of the earth,”
of creation as in nature.
This
merging of primitivism with a gendered attitude can be detected in the way the
Swedish critic Gustav Näsström characterized the work of Toini Muona, a leading
artist at the Arabia factory:
Muona’s stoneware shows
a stubborn opposition to the regular roundness of the thrown form. It is said
that during her lunch breaks she wanders around, scraping lumps of clay with a
teaspoon, and in this way many of her forms have taken shape. Some of them are
crooked vases with dents on them, others are small tilting plates and bowls
like oyster shells or upturned mushroom caps with tattered broken edges,
meshlike patterns scraped or engraved on their surfaces.
Näsström’s depiction of a carefree Muona—the
girl potter—scraping away at a lump of clay is an image of unconscious creation
in which formal innovation is replaced by childlike curiosity. The aesthetic
(innovative) element in the ceramist’s work was left vague, as part of the
mystique of intuitive creation and of the Finnish child of nature.
In
view of the exoticism that informed critical discourse, it is hardly surprising
that Finnish designer Aune Siimes’ delicate porcelain jewelry of the 1940s conjured
up in the mind of an Oslo critic “the barbaric negro ornaments made from
the teeth of a predatory beast!” The image of primitive, unconscious
creativity was appropriated by the male master designers of the 1950s. Tapio
Wirkkala, for example, was admired in Italy as a rugged uomo naturale, who was reputed to eat flowers and wrestle with
bears in the morning. In the design process Wirkkala talked of “seeing
fingertips,” conveying to an “other world,” through which form was
created intuitively. The vitalist-transcendentalist overtones that inform
Wirkkala’s identity as a designer help us understand why the time he spent
working for Raymond Loewy’s design office in the United States in the mid-1950s
remained a brief and unsuccessful experiment. At Loewy’s office, Wirkkala was
given the task of drawing the dashboard and handles for a car, as part of a
precise and differentiated industrial design process. A craftsman at heart, he
did not feel at home in this mechanized design culture. As Edgar Kaufmann explained,
“Throughout his work Wirkkala is as unmechanistic as possible—a true
romancer of the far North.”
The
designer Timo Sarpaneva on the other hand explains: “My grandfather was a
shaman, he chanted spells and set bones as was done in the olden days…. I
am just that kind of primitive being. I am also awfully childish…. This is
my strength.” This creator of ultramodern objects continues to
identify himself with the exotic Finnishness that characterized the field in
the early years of his career. The idea of a “naive,” unconscious creative
process was an essential aspect of the discourse which brought Sarpaneva’s
objects into the public consciousness.
These
examples show how national mythological components, romantic aesthetic
discourse, and personal biography merged in the charting of a modern (Finnish)
artist type in design. The Germanic concepts of Volksgeist, Kunstwollen,
and Nordic pathos recur in writings about Finnish design. The French
philosopher Henri Bergson’s antipositivist vitalism, in many ways a reversion
to the romantic tradition, was also absorbed into contemporary design
discourse.
The
origins of the artist image given to Finnish designers can be traced to the
early romanticist Friedrich von Schlegel, who posited that true creativity occurs
in a naive (unconscious) state. The related tendency to exaggerate the inexplicable
aspects of works of art is found in the theories of expressionism. According to
Paul Fechter (Der Expressionismus,
1915), for example, excessive conceptualization and the conscious valuation of
form/design was against the “holy spirit” of art. The tradition
of “something in me creates” equates to the unwillingness of Finnish
designers to explicate and thus, perhaps, trivialize the creative process.
The
critical reception of Finnish design in Scandinavia greatly influenced the
Finns’ conception of their own national design culture. In the catalogue for the
joint exhibition of Finnish fine arts and design “Modern Art in Finland:
An Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture, Graphic and Applied Arts” that
toured Great Britain from 1953 to 1954, the Finnish curator Jaakko Puokka
summarized the idea of Finnishness in design, in what is now recognizable
tautological rhetoric: “The Finns interpret the world in terms of feelings
and instincts rather than visually, and this is how our art should be
interpreted.” He also stressed the lack of traditions and, needless to
say, the importance of the northern climate and nature. These preconceptions were
then appropriated in several British assessments, even somewhat artificially:
for example when the narrow forms of vases were seen to derive from rugged nature
itself, where flowers grew too sparsely to be gathered into a bouquet; or when
the engravings on Finnish glass objects were linked with a Lapp tradition of carving
ornaments on reindeer horns.
Although
Scandinavian exhibition reviews were replete with almost unanimous praise of
Finnish textiles and ceramics, between the lines there is a condescending attitude
toward “little Finland.” In a review of the 1941 exhibition Ny Finsk
Konstindustri (New Finnish Applied Arts) at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm the
Swedish critic Gotthard Johansson pointed out how the Swedish king had
assiduously studied “all the talented and beautiful things which diligent
Finnish fingers have created,” the tone was naively patronizing.
Concealed behind the admiration for the accomplishments of war-torn Finland was
a hierarchical order; the Swedish and Danish reviews were expressed vertically,
from the point of view of a traditional normative quality. In 1946, while
introducing the press to the collection of Arabia ceramics to be exhibited in
Denmark that year, Kurt Ekholm, the factory’s artistic director, noted: “With
good reason we fear the criticism of our [Danish] hosts…. Alongside these
traditional artists we, the Arabia artists, are like children playing with
clay.”
The
repetition of metaphors of youth and innocence in the Scandinavian reception of
Finnish applied arts implied a fresh creative force, but it also indicated Finland’s
position in the Nordic hierarchy. Instead of unqualified praise there was talk
of promise. However, most of the artists in question had already reached one apex
in their careers and created what are now recognized as modern classics of the
Finnish applied arts. The Finnish “otherness” stressed in the
Scandinavian discourse implied restraint. The associated “racial”
concept appeared as a metaphor, lending the sanction of “natural
order” to expressions of difference and distance. This prejudice comes
remarkably close to the antiquated attitudes of Western nations toward non-European
peoples, attitudes which today are understood as part of a Western system of
restructuring the cultural other.
The
idea of race that appears either directly or indirectly in writings on the
applied arts reflects the nineteenth-century notion of the Finns as a
“lower” Mongol people, prevalent in Scandinavian encyclopedias in the
first half of this century. It is perhaps surprising that the racial
concept should reappear in design criticism during the Second World War,
despite the gruesome realities of National Socialist racial policies. There
were, however, also positive connotations mixed into this concept of race. In
the field of the applied arts as elsewhere, Finns were perceived as a “Noble
Savage,” concealing behind a reticent and clumsy exterior such positive
attributes as tenacity, honesty, and profundity. The Finnish primordial force was
defined from the point of view of “civilization,” but within the
context of modernism this primitiveness could be admired. The ennoblement of
the savage was influenced by the intense sympathy felt for “brave little Finland”
during the war.
A
review in Form, by the English critic
Frank Austin, of the joint-Nordic exhibition “Nordiskt Konsthantverk”
held at the Liljevalchs Konsthall in Stockholm in 1946, showed that the exotic
quality of Finnish design was not merely a Scandinavian fabrication. Austin began
his appraisal of the Finnish section and its ryijy rugs, whose “almost exotic emotional expression”
dominated his impression of the exhibition: “This intensive Nordic upsurge
of emotion coupled with a strong empathy with nature gives the Finnish section
its particular character. Even the love of the Nordic people for spring can be
found in these fair rugs, whose brilliant colors are like the sun on a moss-covered
rock or the surface of water, but an even stronger Nordic feature can be seen
in other rugs which, in the twilight evoked in their dark and mystic color, are
reminiscent of the mossy forests.”
Austin
had a clear picture of the characteristic nature of Finnish design. Its origins
evidently lay in a feeling for nature:
It is not so much a
question of literally using natural forms as the rare ability of the Finns to
use fortuitous natural shapes or those that result from specific stages in
craft production. The same emotion that causes an artist to create something
beautiful out of a hollow birch root, the same instinct that says what shall be
stressed and strengthened, what is to be removed and what is to be retained…. And finally you get … a glimpse of the religious mentality you always
come across with people living in close contact with nature, and which gives to
Finnish works their unique character.
Such
insights drew from cultural stereotypes, but it would be cynical to dismiss them
as mere rhetoric. The Finnish textiles had a more expressive feel about them and
a greater color intensity than the Swedish ones to which they were consistently
compared. The unconventional Finnish interpretation of traditional ceramic forms
with their rich glazing made Swedish ceramics appear contrived and academic.
When new glass by Tapio Wirkkala and Gunnel Nyman were introduced at the
“Nordiskt Konsthantverk” (Nordic Applied Arts) exhibition in 1946 at
Stockhosm’s Liljevalchs Konsthall, the theme was a familiar one that had been
borrowed from ceramics and textiles: reduced outlines (hinting at natural
associations), whose aesthetic nuances were concealed in suggestive material
effects.
It
is worth noting that the Swedish and Danish response to Finnish design was
somewhat different from that of Norway with its more outspoken enthusiasm. In
Norway, Finland became a model alongside Denmark and Sweden. The Norwegians
were astonished to discover an artistic elegance and joie de vivre in Finnish
design, instead of the heavy ponderousness normally associated with Finnish
national character.
In
his writings Knut Greve, director of the Foreningen Brukskunst (Norwegian
Society of Craft and Design), showed how Norway identified itself with Finland
as a “young” applied arts culture in the Scandinavian hierarchy.
According to Greve, the emphasis on individuality was a natural way for Finland
to differentiate itself from the “over-cultivated” national styles of
Denmark and Sweden. The traditions of these neighboring countries had not
managed to sap the spirit of experimentation in Finland; instead, uninhibited
creative innovation and freedom had been allowed to flourish. Greve felt that
Norway had much to learn from this independence and freedom. As early as 1941
he had written with great enthusiasm:
When we look at young
Finland, we observe an entirely different national character, which blows not
like a fresh wind but more like a gale through Nordic cooperation. We do not
yet know what this strange country has to offer, or how deep an effect it will
have on the other Nordic countries. But what we have seen up to now reveals a
talent which shows that under normal conditions it will be Finland that will
soon take the lead in the Nordic applied arts …. Finns have not the
methodical nature of the Swedes, but on the other hand they are free of their
inhibitions. Their many great talents have had more freedom. They have broken
out with a violent force, reminiscent of the Norwegian renaissance of the last
century.
An
Everyday Culture?
The
Finnish applied arts had an ambivalent relationship to the “everyday
wares” philosophy propounded by Nordic democracy, and its design culture
was long tainted by an artistic elitism.
The
crucial question of the role of craft within the field of design as a whole had
been discussed in Finland since the turn of the century, and in the 1920s it
received a new impetus from the Swedish vackrare
vardagsvara (more beautiful things for everyday use) rhetoric. The concepts
of “socializing taste” and “more beautiful things for everyday
use” became popular even in Finnish applied arts circles. The ideological
basis for this discourse in Finland was tenuous, given the prevalent nationalist
cultural atmosphere, with its desire to identify the country as a virile
independent state. One-of-a-kind handcrafted standouts were favored for their
representational quality, despite calls for more socially oriented policies by
the outspoken group of “functionalists” such as the architects Alvar
Aalto and P. E. Blomstedt, and art critic Nils Gustav Hahl. The alliance of art
and industry was carried out differently in Finland than in Sweden: until 1946 there
were only two full-time professional designers working in the Finnish glass
industry, and at Arabia, the leading ceramics factory, a small number of dinner
services aspiring to the ideals of modernism was designed between 1936 and 1948,
despite the fact that the factory employed six to ten full-time “artists.”
After
the 1945 Arabia exhibition in Stockholm at NK department store, Åke Stavenow
published a polemical critique in Form.
In an otherwise highly appreciative review, Stavenow questioned the estrangement
of Finnish artists from the design of utility goods. Kurt Ekholm responded
in a written statement, defending the elitist identity of the Arabia factory:
“That our free-working artists have thus far achieved such a high level,
as Scandinavian criticism has unanimously shown, is based solely on the fact
that they have been free to devote themselves to their art, without being
forced to labor in the weed-invested garden of household wares.”
Many
of the pioneers of modern Swedish design were originally trained as painters,
and for them the applied arts meant willfully foregoing their artistic “freedom”
in favor of idealistic “beautiful everyday goods.” The vast majority
of Finnish artist-designers were trained in the craft aesthetics, unfettered by
the mission of social reform. Cultural stereotypes could be useful, even in
defending this “handicap.” An apt cultural humility is expressed in
Kurt Ekholm’s 1947 article concerning Finnish utility goods (or lack thereof),
in which he stated that “an intellectual attitude does not come as naturally
for us than the Swedes and Danes.”
Stig
Lindberg was one of the Swedish designers whose response to Stavenow was
published in Form. “Oh
yes,” he wrote, “the ideal ceramist is production manager, social
reformer, architect, adman, salesman, technician and clerk. This is something
we have made quite sure of here in Sweden. But we should also raise our hats to
the Danish and Finnish ceramists who do not need to be anything else other than
excellent artists.” Lindberg illustrated his ironic piece with a drawing
of an artist standing on a pedestal—a bohemian sniffing a flower and listening
to a shell—with a placard around his neck proclaiming “Social Struggle.”
Finland’s
specific role in relation to Functionalism could also be seen in exhibition
design. This became more pronounced when the Nordic countries appeared together,
as, for example, in the 1946 exhibition “Nordiskt Konsthantverk.”
Tyra Lundgren reviewed the exhibition in the Danish design journal Nyt Tidsskrift for Kunstindustri. The
Danish section, she wrote, possessed a “maturity and grace,” so that
when you stepped into the Finnish section “you were hit by an emotional
and riotous force of color, a sense of romanticism, which instantly transferred
the visitor into that mixture of original pathos, primitivism, nature worship,
endless thirst for color and equivocal natural lyrical form ideals that gives
Finland its distinctive image.” The exhibition marked the
international debut of pivotal works such as Wirkkala’s “Kantarelli,”
Gunnel Nyman’s “Calla,” Arttu Brummer’s “Finlandia,” and Alli
Koroma’s “Nymphea Alba.”
The
theme and title of the Århus joint exhibition the following year was “Vårt
Hjem” (Our Home), but there was no sign of “home” in the Finnish
section; the exhibition consisted of essentially nonfunctional one-of-a-kind
objects. Hans Lessen proclaimed in Nyt
Tidsskrift for Kunstindustri: “There is no doubt whatever that the
Finnish section is the high point of this exhibition.” It was, according
to Lessen, distinguished by purely aesthetic exhibition design,
“abstract” in its expression. Lessen described the effect as an
“explosion of artistic talent,” in which “a complete fusion of
technology, colors and materials” had been realized. Svend Erik Møller
came to a similar conclusion, writing, “Above all, the Finns are the most
interesting, as their form of expression is entirely different than the other
Scandinavians. Their objects possess an incredible explosive force and even
though this may result in a slightly unfinished form, Finnish design with its
eastern touch offers a rich source of inspiration to the rest of us.”
Finnish
design exhibitions in the 1940s expressed what can be called poetic
materialism, a worship of materials through intense colors and vibrant forms. They
proclaimed the antithesis of war, a joie de vivre, and an escapism tempered by
vitalism—“dreams of stars and negro girls, and all the splendors of the
jungle,” as one Danish critic wrote. This eclectic richness strengthened
the image of Finnish originality in relation to the other Nordic countries.
In
the early 1950s the cult of abundant vitality was replaced by asceticism and the
theme of “dematerialization,” the accentuation of the immaterial and
open space. Individual objects, however, still revealed the ideals of the
1940s, as for example the organic forms of Toini Muona and Tapio Wirkkala or
the ryijy rugs by Eva Brummer and
Uhra-Beata Simberg-Ehrström with their glowing color schemes.
If
the everyday was conspicuous by its absence in exhibitions during the 1940s, it
was brought back in the following decade as a sublime mirage: exclusive craft objects
were allowed to merge with everyday Finnish reality in the perceptions of the
international public. In fact few of the select objects were to be found in
middle class Finnish homes.
At
the ninth and tenth Milan Triennales (1951 and 1954), Swedish concretism and
pragmatism were again paralleled to Finnish spirituality and lofty aesthetics. The
character of Tapio Wirkkala’s exhibition design is analogous to the general
nature of the applied arts in Finland: due to nationalistic undertones and
postwar reconstruction idealism, design was not thought to have a material
content but a spiritual one as well, and its goals were at least as much
cultural as they were commercial.
Wirkkala’s
controlled design for the tenth Triennale of 1954 created a unified image of
Finland: the enlarged photograph of a national landscape—the lake region of
central Finland—communicated a “Nordic” serenity, a feeling of wide
open space. It provided a picturesque dimension, while serving as a
contextualizing backdrop for the ceramic and glass objects, which in themselves
represented subdued and modern form ideals. As Ragna Ljungdell of the Swedish-Finnish
Hufvudstadsbladet wrote,
“Wirkkala’s glass objects and Sarpaneva’s cosmic dreams of the same material
were but a powerfully glowing condensation of the elements of the Koli-scenery
across the room.” Another Finnish journalist suggested that the
photograph might be too domineering, but in the end finally gave her approval,
as it was “proof of our artist’s love for our land and our nature, from
which they refuse to part even when coming out to the world.”
The
Finnish section at the tenth Milan Triennale was one of the most suggestive,
again revealing that “mixture of primitive daring and incredible elegance,
which always differentiates Finland from the rest of Scandinavia.”
Arthur Hald wrote in Form that the Finnish
interior imparted the most “powerful national impression,” through its
exclusive character, artistic force, and “Finnish individualism.”
Hald singled out Wirkkala’s exhibition design for its experiential quality: it
was a space in which one could “spontaneously see and experience.”
Hald’s choice of words is revealing: he talks of Wirkkala as the “aesthetic
dictator” of the Finnish section and of the uncompromisingly strict selection
of exhibits. “Finland is Best,” proclaimed the Danish Politiken newspaper, lamenting that the
Danish section had not followed the same strict aesthetic selection criteria as
the Finns.
Wirkkala’s
strategy for the Milan Triennales of 1951 and 1954 was cunning: to hide the
economic realities of postwar Finland behind a veil of aestheticized “poverty,”
humility, and asceticism. The exhibitions created an illusion of everyday objects
and of Finland—a sublime representation of the Finnish everyday.
In
the 1950s, foreign characterizations of Finnish design still contained religious
overtones. Former references to pagan folk beliefs gave way to the refined
piety of the “aesthetic gospel” (as the Scandinavian triumph was
appropriately called). The pagan pathos did not disappear altogether, it had
just been made respectable.
In
1954 the Swedish critic Ulf Hård af Segerstad aptly described Timo Sarpaneva
as: “above all an artiste, an
exclusive artist. Disregarding any suggestion of usefulness he allows the
material to conceive its own shape, as a kind of art of aesthetic birth
giving.” Sarpaneva’ s persona appears to be fashioned in terms of its
difference to Scandinavian intellectualism. In Hård af Segerstad’s words,
Sarpaneva’s design process is envisaged as a mixture of unconscious creation
and religious nuances.
In
1955 Sarpaneva was commissioned to design the Finnish section at the “H55”
exhibition in Helsingborg, Sweden. Consisting largely of rigorously selected
craft objects, the Finnish display was arranged as an eloquent “still life,”
a portrayal of aesthetic humility unobtainable in the realm of everyday life.
An anonymous British critic is said to have claimed that every morning he went
first to the Finnish section to say his prayers. The other Nordic stands were
criticized for “trudging along in their 1930s’ functionalist woollen socks.”
Avoidance
of the commonplace as well as contempt for commercial pragmatism was central to
the public image of the Finnish applied arts. The relative absence of Finnish
furniture designs also reflects this tendency. Modern Finnish furniture had
been prominently displayed in exhibitions abroad during the 1930s, but it soon
lost its representative role in the depiction of a Finnish design culture to
other types of objects, particularly glass and ceramics. It was difficult
to associate the popular rhetoric of vitalism with furniture, nor was an
expressive or spiritual emphasis viable in its design. Alvar Aalto’ s designs,
considered abroad to express a distinctly “Finnish” quality, were
rarely exhibited in applied arts exhibitions in the 1940s and 1950s—his designs
were now déjà vu and his marketing
project was considered individualistic. In the 1941 exhibition “Ny Finsk
konstindustri” at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, for example, Aalto’s
absence was explained by the fact that the architect “hadn’t had time to
compose any novelties” for the exhibition. Such “novelties,”
however, were abundant in the field of handcrafted textiles, ceramics, and,
after the war, glass. It should be stressed that the wartime was somewhat paralyzing
especially for glass. Textile and ceramics managed to create wonderful craft
pieces despite shortages. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s it was accepted that
furniture was not Finland’s forté: the Finns wanted especially to avoid an
unflattering comparison with Denmark. In 1947 Arttu Brummer, head of the
furniture design department at the School of Applied Arts in Helsinki noted
reluctantly, “‘taste’ in the field of Finnish furniture was clearly
underdeveloped.”
From Discourses of Otherness to Aesthetic
Protectionism
The
“Finnish feeling for nature” is perhaps a myth, but like most myths,
it is simultaneously true and untrue. Not even the most progressive
modernists were immune to the predominant design discourse. When the designer
Kaj Franck was asked in 1959 about the strength of Finnish design, the devoted
modernist replied without hesitation: “Someone dwelling in the North,
especially a Finn, has lived, and still lives, in the midst of nature. He feels
under his feet the softness of sand, the path and blades of grass, the hardness
of the rock and the smoothness of stones. His sense of color has developed from
the colors of moss, leaves and earth, and his sense of form is derived from
nature’s own shapes.”
When
Finnish design gained international recognition in the 1950s, it was
nevertheless necessary to soften the sharper edges of this earth-bound
exoticism. The nationalist rhetoric continued to be linked to marketing, playing
its role in modifying the ascetic forms of the new tableware. In Franck’s case,
for example, the “conservativism” of his novel designs for Arabia,
was stressed, alluding to the authentic Functionalism inherent in the
indigenous vernacular tradition. Rarely was any reference made in Finland to
Franck’s interest in Japanese, Swedish, or German design culture.
In
the exhibition “Modern Art in Finland: An Exhibition of Paintings,
Sculpture, Graphic and Applied Arts,” the status of Tapio Wirkkala’s
laminated plywood sculpture was elevated above the works of the sculptors Wäinö
Aaltonen and Carl Wilhelms, not because it was modern and beautifully
streamlined, but because “the essence of the vast Finnish forests is
richly expressed in the complex and living lines revealed in the wood laminations,”
which were thought to express “2000 years of the Finnish preoccupation with
wood.”
The
Finnish designers work was also marked by an awareness of the “purity”
of Finnish taste, and foreign influences were readily condemned. The reluctance
to follow Swedish models, for example, played an essential role in the reform
of the ceramics and glass.
Throughout
the 1950s Finnishness was a value which had to be kept from excessive external
influence. At the 1950 annual applied arts exhibition in Helsinki, Kaj Franck
criticized the “all too easy ‘west winds’ and Lombardian breezes in
furniture.” To Franck’s disdain “a dressed-up and frivolous
Scandinavian Forties” was gaining a foothold. In 1957 the Finnish
critic Annikki Toikka-Karvonen credited Marita Lybeck’s “Koto” tableservice
with “being so thoroughly Finnish in appearance … if only [the buying
public] has a sufficient sense of style so that its ruggedness … is not stifled
by pretentious urban sophistication or American-style colors.”
In
writing of the Milan Triennale in 1957, Toikka-Karvonen proudly pointed out
Finland’s distance from the impersonal chic of international design. Toikka-Karvonen
claimed that many of the exhibition pavilions repeated the same ideas, manifesting
a “stiff dry prickliness, amoeba-like slackness and confused compositions.”
Another contemporary critic Kerttu Niilonen was amazed by the forms shown in an
exhibition of Italian ceramic design in Helsinki “which we Finns feel to
be peculiarly sloppy, like lumps of pastry, quite alien to the medium.”
Finnish design identity found its place somewhere between the “elegant and
degenerate artistry” of the Italians and the practicality of the
Scandinavians.
At the Sources of Otherness: Antinormative
Tendencies in Design Ideology and Pedagogy
If a
single spokesman were to be chosen for the Finnish interpretation of modernism—a
discursive focal point in which the factors of otherness are condensed—then Arttu
Brummer is the most compelling choice. He was a major influence in the Finnish
applied arts, an interior architect, glass designer, critic, and teacher of
design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in Helsinki from 1919 onward,
becoming its artistic director from 1944 to 1951. With the exception of
Kurt Ekholm and Friedl Holzer-Kjellberg, who trained in Sweden and Austria
respectively, virtually all the artist-designers mentioned in this catalogue
were Brummer’s students.
The
craft-oriented pedagogical tradition which Brummer personified could be
described as vitalist and antirationalist. Its origins lie in the educational
reform inspired by the English Arts and Crafts movement and adopted in Finland
by the architect Armas Lindgren in 1902. Many features link Brummer to the
pioneer generation of National Romanticism: like his own teachers, he stressed
forms that were traceable to nature but which had been “shaped through the free
play of the senses.” According to his students he was a
“biological” person who inspired them to seek their knowledge of
morphology from Finnish nature.
Usko
Nyström, another Finnish architect of the National Romantic generation, wrote
in Kotitaide magazine in 1911 when
Brummer was a student at the Central School of Industrial Arts: “Free
variation, far from arbitrariness, which does not shun apparent irregularity
and to some extent incompleteness, is the basic requirement of all vital living
art.” He defined a handmade object as a “living individual
being,” which if excessively (mechanically) worked changed into a
“stiff and cold dead object.” Nyström’s words presage the aesthetics
of vitalism for which the Finnish applied arts later became famous. Almost
forty years later Kaj Franck wrote: “An object designed for use should not appear
finished or polished. Its imperfect state is a message to the user, an impulse
to thought and action.”
Arttu
Brummer invested in his students a powerful belief in individual creative
expression; the applied arts were not really distinct from the fine arts,
neither were there boundaries between the different branches of the applied
arts. The ideal was authenticity and intuition, the unspoiled drawing of a
child was an example of genuine creativity. Brummer sought from his students an
emotional expression that was enigmatic and subjective. His design ideology was
also impregnated with religious overtones.
Moreover,
Brummer’s aesthetics were tinged by the hidden agenda of nationalism. In the
1940s he recognized the same romantic characteristics that were evident in Scandinavian
design criticism: “… if our craft art has given its best, revealed
what is deepest in us, it has exuded a Gothic glow and pathos.” The
desired link to tradition was found in National Romanticism and the heritage of
the painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela. In an article written in 1933 Brummer portrayed
the image of authentic Finnishness, characterized in the inimitable primordial
force of the child of nature:
Even if trends in taste
change, it is the intuition in Gallen-Kallela’s works that most affect us …
that unexplainable impression left by a vital, feeling man in his creations.
This heritage left by Gallen-Kallela and Lindgren to the decorative arts is so
precious, that no contemporary movements, such as standardization, must be
allowed to stifle it. We must not sell our speciality cheaply …. [When our
textile art] is admired at foreign exhibitions, it is undoubtedly because of
the primordial force of the creator, this child of nature, interwoven in the
warp and weft, which can never be taken away from us and which others try in
vain to copy…. As the life of our applied arts continuously broadens and
acquires a commercial nature, we must gently nurture this shy offspring of the
formidable forests and fragrant meadows.
Brummer’s
writings defended individual emotional creativity against objective
Functionalism, but at the same time it was colored by a strong, unifying national
art project. Brummer’s words bring us back to Wilhelm Worringer who
stressed the profundity of Northern man and art in contrast to Southern
superficiality. Interestingly, in his evaluation of Functionalism Brummer was
apt to point out its foreign origins; in writing about Alvar Aalto in 1932 and
Kaj Franck in 1950, he pointed out a decorativeness “akin to French taste.”
The notion of Frenchness had pejorative overtones.
In
1949, on the other hand, Brummer wrote enthusiastically about the textile
artist Laila Karttunen: “Her works appeal … especially in their racial authenticity, their national
mood.” Six years earlier Brummer had explained: “In her creations
Karttunen represents Finnishness at its purest; she if anyone has both a clear eye
for color and a rich collection of forms, and she is free from all superficial affectations
or aiming at being the last word.”
Brummer’
s use of the term “racial purity,”
in connection to a woman artist, appears to mean everything humble and untarnished.
In the 1920s Brummer had declared: “We should not strive for Finnishness
in itself, but relentlessly and boldly for racial purity.” To explain what
he meant he took an example of the “negro peoples” who had managed to avoid
racial intermixing, and in which an “original, if not a particularly high
spiritual life had developed.”
Beyond Functionalism
It is
perhaps all too easy to marginalize Brummer’s seemingly anachronistic craft
ideology in relation to “modernism proper”; here, too, it would be more
pertinent to talk of alternative modernisms. In light of the functionalist-traditionalist
polarity personified in Alvar Aalto and Brummer, the latter is seen in an
unreasonably reactionary light. Brummer in fact clearly defended the role of
innovative craft in modern society, co-existing with industrial design. According
to Brummer, craft, unlike industrial design, was capable of producing something
“defiant, novel, confronting conventional taste,” in short, something
modern. The fundamental difference is that Brummer’ s thinking was based on the
qualitative values of craft aesthetics.
Brummer’s
ideas also contained “functionalist” elements, such as the principle of
truth to material and the idea of “organicism,” of recognizing contemporary
needs in objects. Like the functionalists, Brummer understood the social
imperatives associated with industrial production: the factories should employ
the finest artists, and the least expensive object should be afforded the best
design. “L’art pour l’art—that’s lard, pure lard” was a catchphrase he
used when warning his more idealistic students not to lose sight of the
principle of utility in their designs.
A
basic form stemming from function was, however, too easy a solution; what an
artist brought to that form was essential. To Brummer, asceticism was at its
best the “highest expression of beauty,” but when misunderstood it came
dangerously close to spiritual poverty. Brummer, in fact, viewed Alvar
Aalto’s designs as “aristocratic creations” that did not serve the real
needs of the people. As regards Aalto as an exemplary model, Brummer politely
dismissed this possibility: “Prof. Aalto’s approach is so completely
original that out of respect for artistic copyright it cannot be
emulated.”
Brummer’
s most passionate ideas appear in a lengthy article published in 1933
commenting on Functionalism. In it Brummer aimed at enhancing the position
of his field, from an “applied” decorative arts status (subservient to
architecture). He opposed all kinds of hierarchies, whether they were
dictated by the “free” visual arts or architecture:
Craft circles should
thus not oppose the correct aims of the new wave of architects, but neither is
there any need for our craft to capitulate to the tenor of architecture. The
way our decorative artists express their feelings has, perhaps, been laughed
at, but it is precisely the emotional content which is so prominent in our
applied arts…. Intuitive erotic-emotional craft arts belong to that
mysterious world, which up till now has been thought to be the realm of fine
art…. The highest expression of creativity is that an object is conceived
as the artist’s own credo, his own conviction, as the result of a yearning for
beauty.
According
to Brummer, the appeal of craft derived from an intuitive feeling for material,
form, and narrative or symbolic themes, an empathetic impact on the senses, even
the sexual instincts. A work should, therefore, not be overly designed as it is
refined in the subjective experience of the receiver. And Brummer, if anyone, was
a master of “empathetic seeing”—charismatically imparting his experience to
others, such as his students, in awe of the metaphorical eloquence of his
discourse.
Brummer
wrote that in the face of industrial production the individual “capitulates
into becoming a machine,” whereas craft production belonged to the realm
of the emotions, unaffected by expediency. In Brummer’s emotion-oriented
humanism, the attitude to industrialism was anachronistic, especially in regard
to the modernist cult of the machine. What is significant, however, is that
both attitudes, the machine cult as well as the craft ideal, were romantically
tinged. To Brummer, the machine had “invaded the field of the crafts” and
in assessing the ostensible achievements of the machine, “a belief in the
medieval personification of the devil is awakened. Much lyrical ‘torch-bearing’
is required if you wish to see in the smoke, heat and ear-splitting din of an
iron foundry anything other than conditions unfit for human beings.”
The
objects Brummer admired belonged to art culture: “We could imagine spiritual
life as a mass, like a piece of soft clay. When it is pressed by the democratic
hand, it spreads over the resisting surface, but simultaneously becomes
flatter.” This daring defense of elitism was likely to irritate the
“functionalists,” especially when Brummer delighted in sprinkling his aesthetic
language with social metaphors. According to him,
due to economic
circumstances, the spiritual life of the greater population of Finland is not
so refined that its spiritual hunger would yearn for the creations of art…. It is within the nature of democracy to require that culture expands, but not
that it attains great heights. Art, however, is quite the opposite in requiring
exaltation, freedom from the earth’s crust, and the concentration of capital in
ever fewer hands is to its advantage…. I am increasingly inclined to
feel—however much support the democratic way of thinking wins—that it cannot
eradicate the caste system, which in fact is an absolute law of biology …. If we completely renounce the aristocratic concept of society, we shall have to
renounce many of the emotional factors that still characterize our decorative
arts.
Brummer’s
overt elitism may seem shocking to today’s reader. His words should, however,
be read in the context of contemporaneous expressive ideals, or as an aesthetic
rather than sociopolitical attitude. Of course in Brummer’s case, aesthetics
were harnessed to the political agenda of national representation. Brummer
proclaimed: “Above all in our country, where conditions are meager and poor,
the social environment may dampen all spiritual life, making absolutely sure that
no one is allowed to raise his head above this millimeter-high dwarf folk. And
yet it is precisely among us Finns that this will to form grows. We yearn for a
life that would be exalted and worth living, indeed we long for heroes and hero
worship.”
Thanks
to international successes and the attendant media coverage, many of Brummer’s
students became just the heroes he had envisioned. Unfortunately he did not
live to witness the enormous respect they enjoyed, for the real success story
of Finnish design began a few months after Brummer’s death in 1951, when first
critics in Switzerland and Italy, and soon those in Great Britain and the
United States, were ecstatic over the distinctly Finnish blending of the
primitive and the sophisticated. The “Brummerian” tradition with its nationalist
and antimodernist overtones had become sublimated into an internationally
acceptable humanism:
There is, in the Finnish
grasp of applied art, a constant evasion from the machine-made precision of
outline and volume, and a return to the presence of the maker in the life of
the object, with all the fancies and the unforeseen vibration of his creative
fingers …. So it is in the applied arts, rather than in the legitimate
ones, that we should look for the most advanced aspect of Finnish art—and this
is a serene humanist outlook. In this age of the machine Finnish artists
reassert the human presence in their work …. And by their awareness of
present-day sensitivity, they confer true value to what might have been only a
pitiful instance of idolatry of functionalism.
The
Finnish art historian Altti Kuusamo has written: “Culture, wherever it is
located, is equally distant from nature,
even in so called peripheries…. We present nature with the gift of culture
and it receives this gift, insisting to call it nature.”
“Nature”
in Finnish design was not merely a matter of appropriating forms such as the
mushroom-like shape of Wirkkala’s vase called Kanterelli: it was also created
by a seemingly naive naturalism, linked with the nature of the Finnish people,
the imagined Volksgeist or spirit of
the Finn. The (self) marginalizing logic of the “national nature
paradigm” was inseparably linked with Finland’s cultural otherness. The
model exoticism that established itself in Scandinavian reception inspired
Finnish designers to recognize, utilize, and further enhance their special
“Finnish” character, in the design process as well as the
presentation and verbalization of the objects. The rhetoric of otherness, when
stripped of its most embarrassing attributes, strengthened the Finns’ view of
their national design culture and its marketability in an international
context. The romantic associations favored in design discourse were highlighted
by the strong and persistent presence of individual crafts, which had an
essential role in the creation of the public image of Finnish design.
Paradoxically
the notion of freedom from tradition (Finnish youthful “innocence”)
was emphasized especially in the 1940s, while in the 1950s engagement with a
reinvented “tradition” was stressed: authentic, honest functionality,
deriving directly, as it were, from the primitive log cabin. This demonstrates
the strength and durability of the national rhetoric: it flexibly transformed itself
from romantic vitalism to constructivism, adapting itself to the changes in
design ideals of the 1950s.
The
“natural-organic” form also provided a shortcut to formalist
avant-garde: understood in international circles as an expression of
“national” aesthetics, the ryijy
rugs, ceramics, and finally the glass objects—modern and sculptural, yet
softened by associations with nature—crept as if unnoticed into the realm of
modernist abstraction. Reference to national elements worked to legitimize the
experimental new forms. This was true both in Finland and abroad: for Finns,
the national content evoked feelings of security and pride connected with
cultural continuity and independence, while abroad it emphasized exoticism, a
classified “otherness,” lending individual content to an alternative
modernism.
Although
the exoticism was subdued and the “racist overtones disappeared soon
after the Second World War, the virginal quality of Finnish design—its unspoiled
(if not naive) purity, humility, and innocence—continued to be stressed in
foreign assessments. This was part of a search for innocence, “epic wisdom”
as it were, characteristic of the nostalgic strain of modernism: Finland was
among the peripheral rural areas singled out as a source of aesthetic
authenticity. Finnish design could symbolize an escape to an Edenic state of
purity and harmony with nature, providing an alternative to the dominant
mechanistic paradigm of a modern world marked by accelerated industrialization and
urbanization. This was also a reflection of the primitivist theme inherited from
the romantic-expressionist tradition. A potentially agrarian way of life and a mythical
unspoiled relationship with nature worked together to compensate for the lack
of “high culture.” Primitivism, even backwardness, was translated
into a national virtue. This phenomenon was tightly linked with the
antirationalist, “aesthetic protectionism” that provided an
ideological structure for Finnish applied arts education.
It
can be said that Finland’s modern design identity came into being through a
dynamic of sadomasochistic identification—as Julia Kristeva might describe it—a
dynamic of “belonging and not belonging.” Finland strove to be
part of the Nordic community and of Western Europe, yet it remained
characteristically “other.” Finland became an industrial nation,
modern and mobile, while obstinately clinging to the backwoods; to an image of
unspoiled innocence.
© Bard Graduate Center, Harri Kalhal.
I would
like to express my gratitude to Nina Stritzler-Levine, for the generous and
insightful comments that were instrumental in producing an English-language
version of this essay.
