Opening hours
20 May – 31 August
daily 10-18
From September 1 Tue-Sat 10-16, Sun 10-17

Entrance 8/4 €

 

Thought about things to paint during the night of 22 January 1909 . Picture of Mary at Margitziget: More background, a lot of green. Shrill and thick blue, the sunshade maybe open, and shadow on the back. The grey fence in ‘paint blue’, more surface below, flaming red reflection on the face.
(Akseli Gallen-Kallela in Paris, 1909)

The Gallen-Kallela Museum ’s summer exhibition focuses on the artist’s works of the first decade of the 20th century. The extensive work of painting the frescoes of the Jusélius mausoleum in Pori was followed by a period of change in style evident in both brushwork technique and the artist’s use of colour. Gallen-Kallela moved from national-romanticism tinged by symbolism towards expressive realism. His studies of Finnish nature lent themselves to interpretations in which colour was given the leading role.

At the Salon d’Automne of 1908 in Paris Akseli Gallen-Kallela encountered major changes in art represented by phenomena such as the Fauvism of Henri Matisse. The events of the international art world inspired Gallen-Kallela to a new enthusiasm for work. Writing to his friend Johannes Öhquist, he noted that his inner self had blossomed, receiving its immediate expression above all in colours, so that I have painted without interruption the whole time. This is can be seen in equal measure in the water maidens of the Kalevala and Parisian boulevard scenes with their idlers. Gallen-Kallela, however, did not take to the boldest Fauvist and Cubist experiments of modernism, and the metropolis of the arts remained a temporary stopover on his way to Africa.

The years following Gallen-Kallela’s return to Finland were marred by conflicts with the younger generation of artists, especially with the November group that formed around the painter Tyko Sallinen. In Finland , Gallen-Kallela’s works of rich colours that he painted in Africa were dismissed as mainly superficial sketches or reportage pictures without any psychological depth. In the 1910s, Gallen-Kallela was viewed in quite dichotomous terms. Though expected to renew himself in his art, his attempts to do so were put down. His new Kalevala themes, in turn, were criticized as outmoded interpretations. Gallen-Kallela still experimented boldly with the bright palette in a number of portrait studies, such as Portrait of Professor Väinö Salminen (1911). Severe criticism gradually ended the artist’s new form of expression. The Africa period of 1909-1910 remained the apex of Gallen-Kallela’s colourism.

The Painter’s Triad is especially based on the Gallen-Kallela Museum ’s own collections. Works on loan from other collections (including the Turku Art Museum , the Ateneum in Helsinki and private collections) deepen the exhibition’s theme of colourism.