Gallen-Kallela: Mythes et nature (Musée Jacquemart André)
Laura Gutman, Tutta Palin, Anne Pelin, Tuija Wahlroos, Ville Lukkarinen
Musée Jacquemart André & Mercatorfonds, 2022
€39,95
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In 2022, the Musée Jacquemart-André will focus the spotlight on the oeuvre of the Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931). Drawing on seventy works from public and private collections, including some exceptional loans from the Gallen-Kallelan Museo in Espoo (Finland), this monographic exhibition catalog focuses on the aspect that has dominated his entire career: the Finnish landscape.
Clouds are reflected, sometimes matte and sometimes shiny, depending on whether the ice has melted or left a fine trail on the water. Cotton wool creates new shapes. Suddenly a tree breaks the horizontality of the landscape and underlines the loneliness that prevails in these Nordic regions. No one has ever captured Finland better than Gallen-Kallela. His oeuvre is opposed to the ever-increasing modernity and is anchored in an untouched nature of breathtaking beauty. He draws his inspiration from the seasons, the forests and the countless Finnish lakes. His symphonic landscapes shimmer under the full force of the natural elements. It seems that ancestral, mythological and sacred powers lurk in these symbolic landscapes.
Although works by Gallen-Kalella have already appeared in thematic exhibitions on Finnish or Scandinavian art, it was the large retrospective devoted to him by the Musée d’Orsay in 2012 that introduced the Parisian public to the artist’s career. . His work was initially best known for its representations of the Kalevala myth and was interpreted in terms of a national discourse, but since then it has been explored in all its diversity, including his travels to Africa and New Mexico.
The exhibition with accompanying catalog with which the Musée Jacquemart-André wants to contribute to the dissemination of Finnish art beyond the national borders is admittedly more limited in scope, but it mainly aims to delve deeper into the relationship between man and nature as it evolves over the course of his career. At first it is ethnographic, but from the 1895 onwards it was inspired by esoteric thought, only to develop on an unparalleled scale around the turn of the last century. At the same time, his style evolves from naturalism to symbolism.
The construction of his home-studio Kalela in 1894, far from the city and any modernity, occupies a central place in the artistic and conceptual definition of the artist’s role in nature. Within this microcosm that is both outwardly and inwardly oriented, Gallen-Kallela realizes his artistic utopia that permeates his entire oeuvre. IN FRENCH!
ISBN: 9789462302877
