Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1943, Page 185

REVUE LITTERAIRE
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tone remains. The classical element
is not formal inspiration and classi-
cistic restraint. Exacting destinies,
inspired compulsory service at the
frontier of a civilization have here
found their natural form of ex-
pression.
The same feature is also evident
in Finland’s great sculptor, Vainö
Aaltonen. Few countries — apart
from classical Greece — seem to
me to possess so eloquently simple
a humanness in its war monuments
as Finland. To visualize this clas-
sically simple, but still high and
ardent tone we may compare Eldh’s
powerful, but rhetorical Strind-
berg in Stockholm and Aaltonen’s
Kivi in Flelsingfors or Milles’s
historicizing Delaware monument
and Aaltonen’s reliefs of nobly stern
settlers in the town of Finland
(Chester) in New Sweden in Penn-
sylvania. Professor Onni Okkonen,
who takes an absolutely excellent
survey of the history of Finnish art
(and gives the artists of Finland
sincere and wise advice and war-
ning) in his chapter on pictorial art
in the Liberté créatrice, is of opinion
that Finnish melancholy has perhaps
been emphasized rather too much
in the statue of Kivi. The figure
according to Okkonen has a some-
what strained effect. I for one at
any rate have always cherished the
opposite view and felt something
unrestrained and unrhetorical about
the statue. I have in it felt just
something of that which Okkonen
says in his interpretation of the
great monument of spiritual victory
erected after the peace of defeat
of 1940, Aaltonen’s relief in the
ceremonial hall of the University
of Helsingfors: “in its marble
beauty it seems to rise to the spiri-
tual world of antiquity, though at
the same time creating a directly
Finnish impression.”
If in recent art of painting we
should look for a similar allusion,
it would be in Lennart Segerstrale’s
wall paintings in the Bank of Fin-
land. Here we see the same classical
will of expression, the same human
warmth in many of the figures. To
Okkonen’s survey in the Liberté
créatrice I should like to add re-
ferences to the same author’s works
L’art finlandais (Helsingfors 1938)
and Die finnische Kunst (1943), and
to Lennart Segerstrale’s Finlandia-
fresker i Finlands bank (Helsing-
fors 1943). They may illustrate
what has here been hinted very
briefly, and what in the Liberté
créatrice also could be given only
in bare outlines. They point out
after the Golden Age — Edelfelt’s,
Gallén Kallela’s and Jarnefelt’s
Age — an eccentric artist of high
rank like Helene Schjerbeck, dream-
ing lyricism as in Ellen Thesleff.
But at the same time we often with-
in Finnish painting get an impres-
sion, which Okkonen by no means
contradicts, that Marsyas, the clum-
sy player of the peasant’s flute, in
his coarsely painting narrator’s joy
with losses and profits has un-
dauntedly taken up the old singing