Vilho Lampi

Biography

The 1931 painting “The Blue Bucket” is so well known in Finland that it has long been almost a legend. It belongs to the newspaper Kaleva. It was painted by a man who at the same time worked on a farm every day.

Vilho Henrik Lampi was born on 19 July 1898 in Oulu (the Swedish name of the town is Uleåborg), then in the Grand Duchy of Finland, and grew up in the Kakaravaara district. He attended the elementary school, and at eleven moved to Liminka: his father had bought the Matinlauri farm there, in the centre of the village, on the bank of the Liminganjoki river. School exhibitions of the time often gave him a whole wall, and he was known as a diligent reader, reciter and young writer.

From 1921 to 1925 Lampi studied at the drawing school of the Finnish Art Society in Helsinki. He worked a great deal, and his friends called him Nero-Lampi. In those years he painted Expressionist pictures in which the influence of Tyko Sallinen, Alvar Cawén and the November Group can be heard. Although he grew up in a town, from his first student years he stressed that he was a countryman, from Liminka: at student evenings he danced the “devil’s polka” waving a knife, and introduced himself to guests as “Vilho Lampi of Liminka”, as weighty as the best householders of the parish. He made his debut at the annual exhibition of Finnish art in 1922, while still a student.

After his studies he returned to the farm, took part in its work and painted. His early pictures of this period are usually called heroic: large, dramatic canvases of 1930, among them “The Emperor of the Parish”, “The Horse Swindlers”, “The Executioner”, “Bridge Dances”, “Pig Slaughter”, “The Moonshiners” and “The Knife Man”. The people in them are coarse, aggressive and brazen. Some critics found in these paintings, perhaps, the most accurate visual expression of the mood of the Lapua Movement, a nationalist movement of the early 1930s, and Lampi himself was among the founders of the Liminka branch of the Patriotic People’s Movement.

In 1931 he spent two months in Paris, studying at the Académie Colarossi and at Maison Watteau, and in the spring also saw the museums of Berlin and Brussels. After this his painting turned towards objective observation. He began to paint Liminka landscapes and people from his circle almost meticulously, in small detail, and the size of his canvases shrank. Self-portraits, landscapes, portraits and still lifes became his main subjects, often on plywood, as in his student years. In an interview with Kaleva in 1933 he complained that in Paris the Expressionists of the turn of the century were very poorly represented, and named Gauguin and Matisse among those who had stayed with him. Picasso he defended against his critics. His only solo exhibition took place in Oulu in 1931: 53 works, a record number of visitors, and almost half sold.

His later works include “The Liminganjoki” (1931 and 1933), “Girl at the Edge of the Ice” (1933), “Stripe” (1934), “The Sauna Roof” (1935) and the “Self-Portrait” of 1934. His last major work was “At Mother’s Grave”: the first version was shown in 1933, the second finished in 1934. Judging by this list, he never lost his formal discipline, and I would not call these years a time of decline.

His works appeared at the annual exhibitions of Finnish art almost every year from 1922. Abroad they were shown in Moscow in 1934, in Riga in 1935, and in Berlin, Düsseldorf and Hamburg. He was written about in the French publication “Livre d’Or: L’Art Contemporain” as early as 1930. He won third prize of the Finnish Art Society in its 1933 competition, and fifth (1934) and second (1935) prizes in the state art competition, as well as several grants from foundations.

Lampi died on 17 March 1936: during a trip to Oulu he jumped from the railway bridge into the Oulujoki river. His body was found after the ice broke up, on 5 May, by the shore of Elba island.

He was buried in the cemetery at Liminka or, according to other accounts, in the Rantakylä cemetery.

In the 1950s memorial exhibitions “rediscovered” him, and Paavo Rintala’s novel “God Is Beauty” (1959) made him the hero of a legend about a lonely, misunderstood artist. The critic Heikki Kastemaa objected that Lampi was by no means a forgotten master: he received grants and prizes, exhibited abroad and lived quite comfortably. In 1967 the Vilho Lampi Society was founded in Liminka, and since 1972 it has maintained the artist’s museum in the old stone school. The painting “At Mother’s Grave” was the first acquisition of the Oulu Art Museum.