Akseli Gallen-Kallela

Biography

“Old Woman with a Cat”, painted in the summer of 1885 in the coastal village of Salo and finished in Paris, shocked the public at the Finnish Art Society exhibition in 1886. Conservative critics reproached the painter for the ugliness of the people he showed; supporters of the new art praised his uncompromising realism. For Finnish painting this canvas was a turning point.

Axel Waldemar Gallén was born on 26 April 1865 in Pori (Björneborg in Swedish), then in the Grand Duchy of Finland. The family spoke Swedish; his father worked as a bank cashier and also practised law and ran the family farm, and his mother liked to paint and supported her son. From 1867 they lived in Tyrvää, on a farm his father had bought. At eleven the boy was sent to Helsinki, to the Swedish Normal Lyceum, because his father opposed his wish to become a painter. At the same time he attended the evening class of the drawing school of the Finnish Art Society and studied at the School of Arts and Crafts. In the autumn of 1881 he moved to the drawing school full time, studying with Sigrid August Keinänen and Albert Edelfelt, and took private lessons from Adolf von Becker, whose influence he later called the strongest.

In 1884 he went to Paris, studied at the Académie Julian and in the studio of Fernand Cormon, and was friendly with Edelfelt and August Strindberg. He was captivated by the naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose memorial exhibition he saw in 1885. His Paris years also produced “Boy with a Crow” (1884) and scenes of bohemian life such as “Démasquée” (1888). In the autumn of 1888, according to his biographers, he became ever more absorbed in the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic; he abandoned his studies, rented a studio in Montmartre and began painting subjects from the story of Aino.

In 1890 he married Mary Helena Slöör. On their honeymoon in Kuhmo, together with the Swedish painter Louis Sparre, he travelled on to East Karelia to collect material for his Kalevala pictures. This journey is usually seen as the start of Karelianism, the current that became central to Finnish national romanticism. The “Aino Triptych” is among the first large works on these themes.

In December 1894 Gallen-Kallela moved to Berlin, where he was preparing a joint exhibition with Edvard Munch. Meanwhile, in 1894–1895, a house and studio called Kalela, in the wilderness, was built to his design by Lake Ruovesi. In March 1895 a telegram arrived with news of the death of his eldest daughter, Impi Marjatta, from diphtheria. His work, until then romantic, became harsher. From 1896 to 1899 he painted the pictures that are considered his best known: “The Defense of the Sampo”, “Lemminkäinen’s Mother”, “Joukahainen’s Revenge” and “Kullervo’s Curse”. In Berlin he took up printmaking and began working on colour woodcuts, in London he studied stained glass, and in 1897, in Italy and at Pompeii, he studied fresco.

For the 1900 World Fair in Paris he painted the dome of the Finnish pavilion with scenes from the Kalevala, among them “Ilmarinen Plowing the Field of Vipers”. In this fresco one of the vipers wears a small Romanov crown: this was how he expressed his wish to see Finland independent in the years of Russification. For the pavilion he also designed furniture and the “Flame” rug. The fair brought him two gold and two silver medals. In 1901 he painted the concert hall of the Student’s Union in Helsinki (“Kullervo Sets Off for War”), and in 1901–1903 he painted the Jusélius Mausoleum in Pori, a memorial to the eleven-year-old daughter of the industrialist Fritz Arthur Jusélius. The frescoes were soon damaged by damp and, after the artist’s death, in December 1931, were destroyed by fire; his son Jorma restored them from the sketches, finishing the work in 1939, shortly before his own death. In 1907 Gallen-Kallela officially changed his surname to the Finnish form.

In 1909 he moved with his family to Nairobi and became the first Finnish artist to work south of the Sahara: more than 150 expressionistic works were painted there. They returned in February 1911. In 1911–1913 he designed and built a studio and house for himself at Tarvaspää, north-west of Helsinki.

In 1918 he took part, together with his son, in the fighting of the Finnish Civil War. The regent, General Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, commissioned him to design flags, orders and uniforms: Gallen-Kallela produced the insignia of the Cross of Liberty and of the Order of the White Rose, and proposed a flag that was judged too similar to the Swedish one. In 1919 he became Mannerheim’s aide-de-camp and received the title of professor. From December 1923 to May 1926 he lived in the United States, where an exhibition of his work toured several cities; in Chicago he became interested in Native American art and spent time at the artists’ colony in Taos, New Mexico. Working on his plan for the “Great Kalevala”, he managed to complete only about 75 pages of the seven hundred intended; in 1922 the more modest “Koru-Kalevala” had appeared. In 1928, with Jorma, he painted the lobby of the National Museum of Finland.

It seems to me that Gallen-Kallela’s reputation in the 1920s was a strange one: nationalists saw in him the greatest Finnish artist, while modernist critics did not share that view.

He died on 7 March 1931 in Stockholm, on his way back from Copenhagen after a lecture. He was buried at Hietaniemi Cemetery in Helsinki. In 1961 the house at Tarvaspää was opened as the Gallen-Kallela Museum.