Transnationality and stylistic ideology in semi-cubist Finnish art between 1914 and 1923

Abstract

The article focuses on the changes in Finnish modern art and artistic discourse caused by World War I and Finnish Independence in 1917–1918. World War I changed artistic networks radically, because travel to France was no more possible, and Independence of Finland changed the art world with the ideas of national modernism. These changes centred in Finland around the role of cubism – seen as a logical continuation of Paul Cézanne’s art – and were expressed in both formal language and artistic discourse. Questions of “primitive” in art and its connection to cubism and to what is national in art were also essential in defining Finnish modernism and avant-garde in around 1917–1920. There was small exhibition of French cubism in Helsinki in 1915, but otherwise knowledge of cubism came via second-hand sources, such as lectures, art magazines and Der Sturm Gallery’s exhibitions. Norwegian art historian Jens Thiis had a strong impact on notions of cubism in Finland. It is in my interest to show that there were transnational connections between Scandinavia, Russia and Finland, and also more or less between Finland and oth- er “new states”, which were born after Austro-Hungarian, German and Russian empires collapsed. These connections can be seen in formal elements and iconography of kind of cubo-expressionism, which was a kind of fusion of cubist structuralism and expressionist emotion. This “semi-cubism” seemed to serve as stylistic ideology or ideological tool for those who had thoughts of national modernism in countries like Poland (formists), Latvia (artists like Jēkabs Kazaks), Estonia (artists like Jaan Vahtra and Märt Laarman) and Finland (art of the so called November Group). It is obvious that artists in Finland were not conscious of what happened on the southern side of the Baltic Sea, but there are so many parallels which were born by shared general views of the role of new art, that it is possible to see not only France, Norway or Russia, but also Poland, Latvia and Estonia as artistically close to Finland, when one tries to map the topography of Finnish semi-cubism in late 1910s and early 1920s.