Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Síða 90

WAINO AALTONEN
By Onni Okkonen,
Professor of History of Art at the University of Helsinki.
THE historical traditions of the art of sculpture in Finland
are comparatively young. They originated with Sergel’s
pupil, Erik Cainberg, who, at the beginning of the i9th
century, produced a series of reliefs for the Academy of Turku,
and with the young Swedish sculptor C. E. Sjöstrand, who settled
in Finland in the 1850’s. The latter was really the founder of
sculpture here, its teacher, and the interpreter of national ideas of
form. Walter Runeberg, the son of the great poet, and Johannes
Takanen, the son of a poor farm labourer from the district of
Viipuri, incorporated the young art of sculpture here with the
general currents in Europe by taking the road marked out by
Copenhagen and Rome. Then, in the 18/o’s, came the turning
towards Paris. Ville Wallgren, Edelfelt’s contemporary, and like
him educated in little Porvoo, develop the realism of Paris into
sensitive refinement and by the end of the century procure for
themselves recognition and admiration from the arbiters of taste.
Such may be said to be the cultural line of sculpture in Fin-
land; its point of contact with the classical antique, with Rome
and Paris, and with Scandinavia, are obvious. Felix Nylund,
who has so recently died, though he proceeded more directly
from the sculpture of Greece and identified himself more closely
with Scandinavia, has in the main followed the same line.
At the same time, in sculpture as well as in painting, a
national trend grows up from the realism of the 8o’s starting
with subjects in everyday life and also with nationally romantic
ideas. This school is represented by Emil Wikström. At his best,
there is in his plastic conception of his task an elasticity and a
new energy taking the thought back to the Renaissance. This
trend very quickly took on a more popular stamp in Wikström’s
pupils and successors. These sculptors of simple origin show a
pithiness and an unforced naturalness in their work; for artists
who rise from the lower ranks of society bear with them the
tone of their own folk songs and a fresh outlook, enriching the
prevailing style, and this is something noticeable in the art of
Finland ever since the days of Johannes Takanen. At the Paris