'Akseli Gallen-Kallela: Picturing Finland': (Lower Belvedere, Vienna until Feb 2 2025): Cold Comfort

Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Autumn: Five Crosses (Preliminary work for Jusélius Mausoleum)

Akseli Gallen-Kallela is not a household name in the UK, although visitors the National Gallery may well have fallen for the chilly calm of Lake Keitele with its zigzagging surface striations and weirdly anthropomorphic clouds hanging heavy in the sky. There is another version in the Belvedere's Picturing Finland exhibition which provides a short, but comprehensive account of an artist who was both isolated in his Nordic wilderness and an active participant in early twentieth century modernism. If you start the exhibition knowing little about Finnish art, and about Gallen-Kallela, you will leave wanting to know more. In truth, if you delve deeper you might find yourself disappointed: Gallen-Kallela travelled widely visiting sub-Saharan Africa and North America, and painting what he saw with mixed results. However, as an artist of Finland - the story told here - he was compelling in his use of landscape and folk culture to create poetic, nationalist and deeply personal works. 

Like many Northern European artists in the late years of the nineteenth century Gallen-Kallela gravitated to to the Academie Julien in Paris where he picked up the airy naturalism of Jules Bastien Lepage. His early work focuses on peasant and fishing communities, figures with hands and feet gnarled and oversized by a lifetime of cold, hard work and images of childhood made poignant the knowledge of what their lives would become. But you sense Gallen-Kallela was not a natural Lepageist: figures interested him less than landscape and increasingly the real world interested him less than the symbols and myths he saw represented there. At the same time he was picking up the Arts and Crafts vibe which was sweeping across Europe, linking it, as one sees elsewhere, to a sense of traditional nationhood. William Morris' appropriation of Arthurian legend mirrors Gallen-Kallela's repeated exploration of the Kalevala. Like Morris he explored printmaking, and was working on a massive project to illustrate the folk epic at the time of his death. 

Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Spring, c.1900, Belvedere, Vienna

The exhibition catalogues these divergent, and almost irreconcilable, interests. There are bombastic, overblown and sometimes frankly weird reinterpretations of Finnish myths: The Forging of the Sampo is 1950s Hollywood technicolor, all big moustaches, high drama and uber-masculinity. Yet alongside this you have strong expressionistic landscapes - forests and snow - and dreamily symbolist seascapes. Arguably, Gallen-Kallela never settles to a style: stylised Japanese-inspired branches and flattened surface patterns seem to fight against the more vigorous brushwork which he learnt as a young man in Paris. Arguably too, he is often to heavy-handed: do we really need a broken fir tree to symbolise Russian oppression? But even so, there is a conviction which carries you through these works. No one makes snow as oppressively heavy, no one makes water look quite so chill, icy even when it is still liquid, no one makes spring sunshine quite so welcomely warm. The isolation of that far north, often forgotten corner of Europe, at the time fighting for its self-determination, is palpable. So too is the warmth of home and family, keeping all that literal and metaphoric darkness at bay.

Gallen-Kallela takes British viewers outside their comfort zone, to an alien world of winter darkness and deathly cold. He exploits myths which bamboozled Salon-goers and seem just as incomprehensible to us today. Yet he is a Finnish exponent of pan-European ideas, widely travelled and artistically literate. Japonism, Arts and Crafts, proto-abstraction, symbolism: these are the strands which wind their way through this exhibition. Like John Duncan in Scotland, like Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis in Lithuania, like any number of artists throughout Europe, Gallen-Kallela was exploring ideas of tradition through an aesthetic of modernism. It is that juxtaposition which makes this exhibition so interesting, an ultimately so universal.