The Groninger Museum in the Netherlands has opened an exhibition titled Akseli Gallen-Kallela: The Spirit of Finland, featuring the work of an artist best known for his paintings illustrating Finland's great myth cycle, The Kalevala. The show runs from December 17 to April 15, 2007. More information can be found on the museum's website, and the show's catalog can be obtained here.
Akseli Gallen-Kallela was born in Pori in 1865, educated in Helsinki, and moved to Paris in 1884 to study art at the Academie Julian. Like many of his contemporaries, he painted bohemian scenes of the Paris art world and cafe life -- until he began to divide his time between Paris and rural Finland, where he lived in remote villages and depicted the people and customs of the countryside. He married his wife Mary in 1890, and they traveled together to eastern Finland and northern Karelia, where he began to gather material for his Kalevala paintings in the very landscapes where the ancient stories were set. Like his friend the composer Jean Sibelius, Askeli became deeply obsessed by these magical tales, using their themes to express an ideal of "Finnishness" at a time when Finland was still part of the Russian Empire.
Askeli went on to become one of the best-loved artists in Finland's history, turning his hand to book design, interior design, textiles, stained glass, metal-work and many other forms of art in addition to painting. In 1911, he fulfilled a life-long dream by building a home and studio in the woods of Tarvaspaa, creating a crenelated castle which has since been turned into The Gallen-Kallela Museum. By the 1920s, however, the painter saw his fame begin to diminish as a younger generation of modernist artists dismissed his work as old-fashioned. Askeli moved his family to America and settled in Taos, New Mexico, where he painted scenes of Western and Native American life in addition to continuing to illustrate his beloved Kalevala.
More information on the Kalevala epic can be found on the Virtual Finland site, on the Sacred Texts site, and in Ari Berk's article on "The Song of the Sampo" in the Endicott archives. You'll also find it on A Europe of Tales, a web project sponsored by the Gallen-Kallela Museum. The intention of the project is to use multi-media technology to present European myths and legends aimed at an audience of children aged ten to fifteen. The stories are produced in eight languages: Finnish, Swedish, English, Gaelic, French, Breton, Icelandic and Italian.
I recommend The Lemminkäinen Suite, symphonic music based on four legends from the Kalevala by Jean Sibelius, and Kalevala: Dream of the Salmon Maiden, a CD of music and song (in Finnish and English) by Ruth Mackenzie. You can also listen to "Kalevala" and "Out of Finland," two excellent programs from Ellen Kushner's Sound & Spirit radio series, by going here.
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