Gallery texts – Modern woman

Modern woman

10.2.–27.3.2022

The Modern Woman opens up a new perspective on 20^th century modernism through women’s art. Women have played a key role in portraying modern life in Finland. They have open-mindedly developed and experimented with various modernist styles, techniques and forms of expression. Women have studied and worked internationally and pursued long careers as independent professional artists. In addition to creating art, many of them worked in other roles including as teachers, artisans and critics.

These women did not allow themselves or each other to be diminished. Rather, they were united by unwavering faith in their own abilities. Finnish women artists were well educated. Gender has not been an obstacle to being a professional artist in Finland, and women also applied for postgraduate studies at European art academies and artists’ studios. Still, the artist’s path was not effortless for women. Many of them had to navigate between their private and professional goals, and few of them married and started families. Indeed, networks and friendships among women artists were vital to many and essential for building careers.

Female artists’ gaze drilled into the present and the art history canon, including its eternal subject, the nude female body. In the 1920s, the so-called ‘new woman’ appeared in works as a symbol of the time. In control of her own body and life, she moved through society on her own terms. The gaze also turned inward. Nearly all of the female artists in this exhibition created self-portraits in which they examined themselves both as representatives of their gender and as independent artists in the profession. The personal and private intertwined with the universal. They all broke barriers and shared the ability to grasp the phenomena of the era, to study them and using them in their work.

The works in this exhibition are selections from the Finnish National Gallery collection, except for a few private loans. I extend heartfelt thanks to the estate of Elga Sesemann and to Tuomo Seppo for their cooperation in realising the exhibition.

A scaled-down version of the exhibition The Modern Woman is part of the Ateneum Art Museum’s export programme and has been shown around the world since 2017. It will be on display at the Turku Art Museum 10 June – 28 August 2022.

Anu Utriainen,
Senior Researcher, Ateneum Art Museum,
Exhibition curator, The Modern Woman

Laila Pullinen

1933 Terijoki | Zelenogorsk, present-day Russia – 2015 Helsinki

Laila Pullinen played a significant role in rejuvenating the formal language of sculpture in the late 1950s and early ’60s. In her informalist, asymmetrical sculptures, experiments with materials combine with abstract expression and tales from antiquity. The intensity of her sculptures builds on juxtapositions and tensions between diverse materials and their properties. Pullinen’s spirit of reinvention extended from freeing the form to sculptural techniques. She developed a unique method of blasting copper plates together with metal firm Outokumpu. Pullinen, who was active in key positions in the field, was awarded an honorary professorship in 1995.

Ellen Thesleff

1869 Helsinki – 1954 Helsinki

Ellen Thesleff was a cosmopolitan, self-confident innovator who mastered various techniques of painting and graphic art. Florence was her second home, but she spent summers at her studio villa, Casa Bianca, in Ruovesi. Thesleff was among the first Finnish artists to move from the dark, sparse palette of symbolism to colourful expressionism, which she adapted to her woodcuts. Late in her career, her expression approached abstraction and her colour scale became dimmer. Besides colour, light and movement, the depiction of nature and natural experiences was a key theme in Thesleff’s oeuvre.

Sigrid af Forselles

1860 Lammi – 1935 Florence, Italy

Sigrid af Forselles was one of Finland’s first woman sculptors. She lived most of her life in France and Italy because, as a woman, she could not study and support herself as a professional sculptor in Finland. Despite being a woman, af Forselles was able to draw living models while she was Auguste Rodin’s student and studio assistant in Paris. She stood out from other sculptor women by taking on monumental subjects. Exemplifying her interest in esotericism, her major work was a series of reliefs entitled The Development of the Human Soul, one part of which is in the collection of the Finnish National Gallery and the other four at Helsinki’s Kallio Church.

Hilda Flodin

1877 Helsinki – 1958 Helsinki

When Hilda Flodin began her art studies, sculpture was considered a male art form and women were not accepted into art schools as sculpture students. Flodin was however interested in sculpture and, after undergraduate studies, applied to become a private student at Auguste Rodin’s studio. For Flodin, this was an unconventional, free phase of her life, exemplifying the lifestyle of the modern ”new woman”.

Flodin’s career as a sculptor was brief, but she can be seen as a pioneer of Finnish sculpture and intaglio. Her best-known works are the soapstone figures on the façade of the Pohjola building in Helsinki.

Helene Schjerfbeck

1862 Helsinki – 1946 Saltsjöbaden, Sweden

Helene Schjerfbeck’s importance in Finnish modernist art is undeniable. The themes and painting style of her work, which had already seen many changes in expression, shifted toward a more simplified, stylised modernism after she moved to Hyvinkää in 1902. Schjerfbeck followed contemporary art through magazines and books and was interested in clothing and fashion. A new phenomenon of the time – the independent, emancipated “new woman” – became one of her key themes. Of particular note is Schjerfbeck’s series of selfportraits, spanning the artist’s entire 70-year career.

Sigrid Schauman

1877 Chuguyev, present-day Ukraine – 1979 Helsinki

Sigrid Schauman was among the generation of artists who began working at the turn of the 20th century. She became interested in depicting colour and light early on. Schauman was a single parent to her daughter and had a long career as an art critic alongside her art. She published more than 1500 essays and only painted during the summers. She began a new period of colour painting on trips to France and Italy in 1949, after retiring from fulltime work. Her work from this period includes a series of nudes. In 1956, Schauman co-founded the Prisma Group, whose artists were interested in international modernism and bright, vibrant colours.

Eila Hiltunen

1922 Sortavala, present day Russia – 2003 Helsinki

Modernist sculpture took a new direction with Eila Hiltunen’s welded metal sculptures. Known as the creator of the Sibelius Monument (1967), Hiltunen made her debut in 1951 and soon gained fame with her cubist sculptures in marble, wood or metal. The impetus for metal welding came on a study trip to the US in the late 1950s. In addition to works in steel, Hiltunen made miniature sculptures, to which she added jewellery, stones and pieces of glass. The lavish decoration of these fantastical heads contrasts with modernist streamlining, a reference to something exaggerated and rejected.

Helmi Kuusi

1913 South Range, Michigan, USA – 2000 Helsinki

Helmi Kuusi was among the generation of graphic artists who began their careers in the 1930s. She was a painter, drawer and particularly a master of gravure printing techniques. The subjects of her works include mother-child themes, interiors, portraits and landscapes. Kuusi was active in Lotta Svärd, a women’s auxiliary paramilitary organisation, during the Continuation War of 1941–44. During these years, she depicted war-torn landscapes in ink drawings, which she later used as the basis of graphic works. Kuusi’s Vyborg series is a rarity in Finnish art history, as it testifies to war’s horrors and all-consuming power.

Gunvor Grönvik

1912 Turku – 1955 Helsinki

Gunvor Grönvik began her career in Turku in the 1930s. Later, she found subjects for her works among her close friends and family, along with Helsinki street views. Grönvik became known for Expressionist portrayals of urban landscapes, as seen from the window of her home on Mannerheimintie. Like many of her contemporaries, networks and friendships among women artists formed significant support and the basis for Grönvik’s professional career. However, she suffered from profound loneliness and alienation and ended her life by drowning in 1955.

Essi Renvall

1911 Oulu – 1979 Helsinki

With modernism and modernisation, studies and professional work in sculpture opened to women. Essi Renvall was the first woman sculptor with a successful career, beginning in the 1940s. She created psychologically acute portraits and busts of cultural figures, writers and artists. Renvall was interested in patinating bronze, from early on treating the surface of her works with colours and decorative motifs. An extensive commissioned work was a series of portraits of 30 authors for the publisher WSOY. Renvall’s best-known monumental work is the Statue of Peace (1968) at Helsinki’s South Harbour.

Elga Sesemann

1922 Viipuri, nyk. Venäjä – 2007 Helsinki

In the 1940s, Elga Sesemann used a palette knife and thick brush to paint portraits, interiors, melancholy mindscapes and urban views of post-war Helsinki. Together with her artist husband Seppo Näätänen, she built a wilderness studio in Ruovesi, where she lived from 1950 to 1964. In Sesemann’s production, this phase is reflected in many different experiments inspired by the surrounding nature, philosophy and literature. Her works almost always include a figurative element, but during her Ruovesi years, her style slipped towards abstraction, taking on a surreal tinge.

Lea Ignatius

1913 Helsinki – 1990 Lohja

Lea Ignatius had already had a long career as a painter and illustrator when she debuted as a graphic artist in 1972. Many of her colour prints are abstract, non-figurative compositions and nature studies. The works are made using a colour graphics method developed by Stanley W. Hayter, which combines various intaglio and letterpress printing techniques. The method is based on the principle that colours of different viscosities repel each other and can be printed from a single plate without mixing. Ignatius later moved on to portray quiet landscapes, which she focused on throughout the 1980s.

Laila Pullinen

1933 Terijoki | Zelenogorsk, present-day Russia – 2015 Helsinki

Laila Pullinen played a significant role in rejuvenating the formal language of sculpture in the late 1950s and early ’60s. In her informalist, asymmetrical sculptures, experiments with materials combine with abstract expression and tales from antiquity. The intensity of her sculptures builds on juxtapositions and tensions between diverse materials and their properties. Pullinen’s spirit of reinvention extended from freeing the form to sculptural techniques. She developed a unique method of blasting copper plates together with metal firm Outokumpu. Pullinen, who was active in key positions in the field, was awarded an honorary professorship in 1995.

Eila Hiltunen

1922 Sortavala, present-day Russia – 2003 Helsinki

Modernist sculpture took a new direction with Eila Hiltunen’s welded metal sculptures. Known as the creator of the Sibelius Monument (1967), Hiltunen made her debut in 1951 and soon gained fame with her cubist sculptures in marble, wood or metal. The impetus for metal welding came on a study trip to the US in the late 1950s. In addition to works in steel, Hiltunen made miniature sculptures, to which she added jewellery, stones and pieces of glass. The lavish decoration of these fantastical heads contrasts with modernist streamlining, a reference to something exaggerated and rejected.