Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Page 96

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LE NORD
youthful period, appear in their full power in the statue of the
runner Paavo Nurmi (1924—25). This work is well known in
Scandinavia, and has everywhere won great appreciation. Nor
is this to be wondered at, for the sculpture belongs to the few
modern statues in which it may be said that the very idea of
sport has been as radiantly incarnated as in the old Greek and
Roman statues of the Olympic victors and athletes. The rhythm
of the runner, the logic of the movement is unique. After Paavo
Nurmi’s statue, Aaltonen carried out a bronze poets’ statue
(Alexis Kivi and the Genius of Poetry) set up in Tampere, and
in the same town three decorative male figures and a female
figure “The Finnish Maiden”, all of them four-and-a-half metres
high. Besides these, he modelled a series of decorative niche figures
for the Session Hall of the Diet Building which, however, have
hitherto remained in their appointed places carried out in gilded
plaster only. “Mother and Child” (1934) owned by the Insurance
Company Suomi belongs to the most mature of his bronze works.
Its spiritual conception bears the influence of the romance of
the Kalevala and its expressiveness can indeed compete with the
best Gothic statues. And finally comes the Aleksis Kivi statue
(1932—3 6) as the stupendous zenith of the series. It was un-
veiled during the fateful autumn days of 1939 in Helsinki. It has
already been said that the expression of the monumental head is
steeped in tenderness. The artistic form in its entirety is of rare
intensity and truthfulness. Perhaps the position of the monument
is not the best possible, being at the side of a square where there
is very much traffic, and surrounded by buildings very hetero-
geneous in style. The statue of the dreamer-poet ought certainly
to stand nearer nature.
Beside these main, fundamental lines running through Aal-
tonen’s production, there are also other spheres to which the
artist’s always versatile imagination draws him with all the
power of the romantic world of phantasy, seeking its way into
new and unexplored areas for realization. He still loves, as m
his youth, to work in marble, as in the Aino head (1920), m
which even the rhythm in the coils of hair represent powerful,
vital life. In the figures of “Waders” in marble, Aaltonen has
so to say allowed the primitive beauty in the figures to be ab-
sorbed in the warm summer atmosphere which caressingly sur-
rounds the soft, undulating curves of the limbs. In the gilded
carvings done about 1925, the artist has tried to renew the sur-