Wäinö Aaltonen

Biography

Aaltonen received his first commission in 1915: a concrete relief for Wiklund's ironmonger's shop in Turku. The relief survives and is now in the sculptor's museum.

He was born on 8 March 1894 in the village of Mäenpää in the parish of Karinainen, then in the Grand Duchy of Finland, the son of a tailor, Matti Aaltonen, and a peasant woman, Ida Katriina. The family moved often, and in 1905 settled near the ferry landing on the island of Hirvensalo, by Turku; Aaltonen regarded this house as his childhood home. In 1907 he finished primary school. From the age of sixteen, between 1910 and 1915, he studied drawing and painting at the School of Drawing of the Turku Art Association under Victor Westerholm; his teachers also included other painters, among them Axel Haartman and Santeri Salokivi. Felix Nylund, who taught at the school, drew him to sculpture. In sculpture he was essentially self-taught: he learned to carve stone as an assistant to stonemasons and to a relative, the sculptor Aarre Aaltonen. The school bought two of his works: a painting, “Head of an Old Man”, and a bronze plaque, “My Father”.

In 1917 he moved to Helsinki. He worked in other people's studios, among them Eemil Halonen's in Siltasaari. His early granite pieces drew attention at once: “Granite Boy” (1917–1920), with its archaic simplicity, and the war memorial in Savonlinna (1919–1921), in which a nude, grieving warrior holds a Greek helmet in his hand. He began as an expressionist and was the only sculptor invited to the exhibitions of the November Group (Marraskuun ryhmä), a Finnish group of modernist artists.

In 1923 Aaltonen travelled to Italy, passing through Germany on the way, met the Italian Futurists and brought back many books on modern art. He had been using Cubism in his paintings since 1914; now it entered his sculpture too. One example is “Musica” (1926), a gilded wooden head. His sketch for the monument to Aleksis Kivi in Tampere was also Cubist, showing the poet absorbed in the sound of a violin. He built his self-portraits from planes and collage: in one he covered part of the face with a letter, in another with gold leaf.

The turning point in his career came with the 1924 Olympics. After Paavo Nurmi's victories the state commissioned a monument, and Aaltonen, until then known only around Turku, received the commission as the most gifted of the young sculptors. The bronze statue of the runner (1924–1925) met expectations; Aaltonen came to be called “the Paavo Nurmi of Finnish sculpture”. The critic Onni Okkonen, an ardent supporter, published the first book about him in 1925. His studio in Hirvensalo, built in 1923, was damaged by bombing in the Winter War and demolished after the war.

From the late 1920s commissions came one after another. Four bronze figures for the Hämeensilta bridge in Tampere (1927–1929): the Hunter, the Tax Collector, the Merchant and the Maiden of Finland. Five gilded figures, “Work and the Future”, for the chamber of Parliament House: they were chosen in an open competition, although the architect Johan Sigfrid Sirén would have liked to commission the works directly. The Kivi monument in Helsinki (conceived 1930–1939), the monument to Finnish emigrants in Delaware (1937–1938). Portraits: Jean Sibelius, President Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg, Crown Princess Louise of Sweden. He worked in bronze, marble, granite, wood and terracotta, and often gilded the wood. He designed about twenty-three book covers, chiefly for his brother-in-law, the poet Aaro Hellaakoski.

After the war came the monuments “Friendship” for Turku and Gothenburg (conceived around 1948, unveiled in 1955) and “Peace” in Lahti (1950–1952), for which he received the Gold Medal of Peace in 1953. In 1957–1959 he made the statues of Presidents Ståhlberg and Svinhufvud in front of Parliament House. In 1940 he was given the title of professor, from 1948 to 1964 he was a member of the Academy of Finland, and in 1958 he became an honorary member of the USSR Academy of Arts.

Aaltonen died in Helsinki on 30 May 1966. He was buried with a state funeral in the family grave in the churchyard of Maaria church in Turku. Above the grave stands his sculpture of the mountain spirit, “Mountain Guardian” (1960).

The museum bearing his name opened in Turku in 1967.