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Opening hours:
Tue–Sat 11–16
Sun 11–17
Mon closed.
Tickets:
Adults 8 €
Seniors 6 €
Holders of S-etu
benefit card 7 €
Students 4 €
Free entrance for children and persons under 18.
In association with:
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"Gallén lives in quite strained and poor conditions, but what does it matter
when one is nineteen and totally convinced that one will became the leading painter of the whole world."
(Albert Edelfelt)
The exhibition All or Nothing – The Young Axel Gallén presents a young artist who shocked the Finnish art public of the 1880s with his depictions of the common people. The young Axel Gallén appeared on the art scene like the tormented hero Kullervo of the Kalevala epic. The teachings for conquering the world were found in the art academies of Paris, where Gallén would work in a disciplined manner with arrested model studies. At his own studio, in turn, he portrayed gay and boldly suggestive Parisian beauties.
With his uncompromising attitude in matters of art, Gallén was committed to the social concerns of French naturalism and the depiction of authentic, unembellished truth. In contrast to this, he also painted bourgeois portraits. His works provide a perspective on the social setting in which artists of the period worked. The inexperienced country boy grew to become a Parisian flâneur, whose gaze captured the heady atmosphere of industrializing modern life as it appeared in the streetscape – fleeting moments and encounters, carnivalistic processions and the alleys of the city. Gallén's Parisian works illustrate in an interesting manner the conflicting elements of his early career, which intertwined a fascination for myths and the mysticism of death that appeared to anticipate his future symbolism. The artist's yearning for the past of the Kalevala epic found its expression in the tragic encounter of the hero Väinämöinen and the maiden Aino. His famous painting of this subject found its final form in 1890 during Gallén's honeymoon in the Dvina region of Karelia.
Axel Gallén as a collector
During his years as an art student, Axel Gallén became interested in collecting Japanese artefacts, a fashionable phenomenon at the time. While in Paris, he bought, among other objects, masks, woodcuts and an altarpiece. These objects decorated his studio and appeared as interesting references in his paintings. In addition to Japanese, and Japonist, objects, the exhibition features ethnographic artefacts that the artist collected on his travels in Finland, such as a ryijy-rug weaved with rooster motif from 1782 that figures prominently in many of his paintings.
The enigma of Madame Cohen-Rubens
The exhibition includes a large number of rarely displayed works from private collections, such as Portrait of Madame Cohen-Rubens painted in Belgium in 1888. This painting was thought to have been lost, until it appeared in an autumn sale at the Bukowski auction house in 2009. This skilful early work has long interested researchers. Significant additional information concerning it was obtained in 2008, when an exhibition at the Gallen-Kallela Museum presented the companionship of Gallen-Kallela and the French ceramist Henry de Vallombreuse. With its rich details, this painting belongs to Gallén's series of milieu portraits, which are represented in the exhibition by Portrait of Professor E. R. Neovius and his Family (1886), among other works.
The Anniversary Year of the Gallen-Kallela Museum
The Gallen-Kallela Museum was opened to the public in 1961. The exhibitions of our 50th anniversary year present the wide scope of Gallen-Kallela's art and outline his development from his early stages as a young rebel to the modern atmosphere of the 1910s. A collection of articles to be published in connection with the exhibition The Splendour of Life contains new perspectives on the work of Akseli Gallen-Kallela. The contributors are 12 researchers representing different disciplines. The articles discuss the background of Gallen-Kallela's works, his role in the international art community and on the Finnish art scene amidst the heated debates of the 1910s.
Lectures on the following Sundays at 1 pm:
23.1. Exhibitions Manager Anne Pelin: All or Nothing! On the Art of the Young Axel Gallén. (In Finnish.)
30.1. Museum Director Tuija Wahlroos, The Gallen-Kallela Museum: Aino – The Background of a Myth from the Kalevala. (In Finnish)
27.2. Art Historian Laura Gutman-Hanhivaara: Axel Gallén's Room in Montmartre (In English)
27.3. Museum Director Elina Heikka, The Finnish Museum of Photography: Model Studies in Parisian Art Academies. The Case of Axel Gallén. (In Finnish)
17.4. Helena Lonkila, MA: The World of the Common People as Depicted by Akseli Gallen-Kallela. (In Finnish)
Museum entrance fee.
Gallen-Kallela Museum homepage
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