Past, Present of Future? Problems of Orientation in the 20's and 30's

Finland's first years of independence were difficult ones for artists. The country was going through a depression and the concept of an artist-proletariat was brought forth more and more strongly in art journalism. Arttu Brummer wrote in the magazine Domus in 1931: In our times and especially under the circumstances in which we now live the artist has become an individual who in a way exists outside society. Nobody really needs him and in vain he raises his voice to demand support and protection from the state. He may somehow be tolerated at national celebrations if he has succeeded in surrounding his name with glamour and if the press has found no fault with him . . . but the next day, after a night's sleep and having returned to grim reality, he is sober again and the maid at the door receives no instructions that would prevent her from turning away a young artist who tries to sell his pictures.

In the visual arts the 20's and the 30's were a period of formalism, narrowness and even narrow-mindedness. The 1910s and the time of gaining indepence were a continuation of the golden era, a period of momentous events in Finnish art. But now Sallinen's time as leader was over and no new innovative leader emerged. In the Finnish arts the 20's were first and foremost a literary decade. Unconventional visual experiments were made in for instance the applied arts, but painting took a rest, was more cautious during the 20's.

A part of the public and also some of the critics let it be known in the early 20's that they wanted artists to be 'more educated and proficient' than the Novemberists. The strengthening of this attitude favoured in the art of the 20's a general direction that tended towards classicism. The tradition of Septem gained new strength, Uuno Alanko, William Lönnberg and other artists in their circle swore by pure painterliness. They undertook to develop artistic culture and to refine painterly means.

But writers, the modernists of the age, scorned the 'conservatism, dormancy and lack of iniative' of Finnish art. Olavi Paavolainen wrote in 1929 in his book Nykyaikaa etsimässä (In Search of The Present): The chaste Aino-maiden returned from her travels deeply convinced that Europe had been driven mad by the afflictions of war and thanked heaven that she had been spared such insanity. Aino withdrew to a quiet village in the backwoods, wrote novels about the countryside and painted backyards, barns, forests and still-lifes. She even sent some of her products abroad and noted with pleasure that they were applauded. Meanwhile Helsinki saw the arrival of jazz, silk stockings, trafic police, seven-story buildings, lines of cars selling bootleg liquor, Diktonius and the street perspectives of Töölö, but Aino was nice and comfortable and merely noted indifferently that the degenerating effect of war had reached aIso Finland.

Past, Present of Future? Problems of Orientation in the 20's and 30's