'A geographical notion turned into an artistic reality': Promoting Finland and selling Finnish design in post-war Britain c. 1953-1965

Journal of Design History

Volumn 15, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 101-116

  Davies, Kevin ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Decorative arts; Design; Exhibitions; Exports; Finland; National identity

Indexed keywords

EID: 34249155365     PISSN: 09524649     EISSN: 17417279     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jdh/15.2.101     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. P. Rouve, 'Finnish humanism'. Art News and Review, 26 December 1953.
2. For instance, at the 1951 Milan Triennale, Finnish design won six grand prix awards, four diplômes d'honneur, seven gold medals and eight silver medals. For a full list, see J. Hawkins Opie, Scandinavia, Ceramics and Glass in the 20th Century, Victoria and Albert Museum, exhibition catalogue, 1989.
3. Suomen Messut (Finnish Fairs) took responsibility for some exhibitions such as the Brussels World Fair of 1958 and the Montreal World Fair of 1967. The displays and interiora for these, however, were arranged by more or less the same group of individuals.
4. Peter B. MacKeith &: Kerstin Smeds, The Finland Pavillions: Finland at the Universal Expositions 1900-1992, Kustannus Oy City, 1992, p. 76.
5. Hermann Olof Gummerus, tape-recorded interview with Cynthia Plaut, 2 April 1993, Riihimäki Glass Museum, Riihimäki, Finland.
6. Illustrations for 'Modern Art in Finland' are elusive: there were some in the Design Council Archive, DHRC, Univenity of Brighton, but these are now impossible to locate. Many of the individual objects were also on display in the Finnish section of the Milan Triennale in 1954. Both of these displays were organized by Tapio Wirkkala and a fair degree of similarity can be presumed. The photographs that I have used of individual objects from 'Modern Art in Finland' are those that were circulated in the early 1950s to promote Finnish design. They are not in situ photographs of the objects at 'Modern Art in Finland'.
7. For the Milan Triennale of 1951 Gummerus suggested that one-third of the funding came from Wahlforss/Wärtsilä and two-thirds from the Finnish Ministry of Education.
8. 'Finlandia' file, National Archive of Art and Design, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
9. I do not want to rehearse these here; by far the best source in English is F. Singleton, A Short History of Finland, Cambridge Univenity Press, 1998, 2nd edn. Also useful, although much of the economic information is derived from Singleton, is H. Hawkins, 'Finding a place in the new world order: Finland, America and the "Design in Scandinavia" exhibition of 1954-57', in M. Aav & N. Strizler-Levine (eds.), Finnish Modern Design, Yale Univenity Press, 1998.
10. These were valued at S300 million in 1938 terms, although they are estimated to have cost at least twice that to produce. Singleton, op. cit.
11. P. Sparke, An Introduction to Design and Culture in the Twentieth Century, Unwin Hyman, 1986, p. 149.
12. Harri Kalha, Muotopolen merenneiden pauloissa, Apeiron, 1997 (with English summary).
13. These were the major participants, but a number of other smaller companies also had goods displayed. Some financial records for Arabia are held in the company archive based at the factory in Helsinki. Records for Iittala and Nuutajärvi are held at ELKA, Mikkeli, Finland. All these records can be difficult to interpret; in particular, they are often incomplete and sometimes contradictory.
14. Before September 1957, £1 = 640 Finnish marks (old ones), after, £1 = 900 Finnish marks. Before the Second World War, the exchange rate was £1 = 227 Finnish marks.
15. Both firms went out of their way to try to obtain the rights to these goods, presumably because of the critical success they had received at exhibitions such as the Milan Triennales.
16. The relevant records for this company are held at the Artek archive, Artek, Helsinki, Finland.
17. The original owners sold the concession after two years because the operation was unprofitable.
18. Kalha, op. cit., points out that this international prestige and the star status some of the designers achieved were used to promote relevant products on the home market. In this respect, Gummerus, for the benefit of the Finnish press, compared the achievements of designers winning medals at the Milan Triennales to those of Olympic athletes such as Nurmi.
19. One of the main advantages for the Danish furniture industry importing to Britain was that the British industry had been disabled during the Second World War and remained uncompetitive throughout the 1950s.
20. Rather than take a quasi-Orientalist stance and speak for Finns about what their national identity might be, I have relied on published work in English. See M. Klinge, 'Runeberg's two homelands', in The Finnish Tradition: Essays on Structures and Identities in the North of Europe, Helsinki, 1993
21. and M. Häyrynen, 'The kaleidoscopic view: the Finnish national landscape imagery'. National Identities, vol. 2, no. 1, March 2000, pp. 5-19 for introductions and further references.
22. W. R. Mead, 'Perceptions of Finland', in M. Engman & D. Kirby (eds.), Finland: People, Nation, State, Hurst & Co., 1989.
23. See D. Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion, Blackwell, 1996.
24. 'Runeberg's solution was to heroicise the Finnish interior as a harsh but beautiful landscape, the inhabitants of which struggled for their bare subsistence ... Runeberg's heroes were toiling and God-fearing peasants who did not grumble over their lot, nor aspire to a grand future.' M. Häyrynen, 'National landscape imagery in the making of Finland', New Comparison, vol. 21, 1996, pp. 146-62.
25. This was primarily for PR and advertising purposes; it was not an altruistic act.
26. Cited in The Ornamo Book of Finnish Design, Ornamo, 1961.
27. Press release, 'Finlandia' file. National Archive of Art and Design, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
28. J. Hampden Jackson, The Listener, January, 1954.
29. Interestingly, photographs of the exhibitions are nearly always monochrome. Colour ones were taken - they appear in the periodical Domus - but they are rarely reproduced. Presumably they do not convey the starkness in quite the same way.
30. Hampden Jackson, op. cit.
31. The Scotsman, 27 November 1961.
32. 'The artists [designers] were uninfluenced by other influences, so they were more independent, more creative, there weren't any magazines available ... none of them had travelled anywhere, so Wirkkala's first experience of a foreign land was Switzerland, perhaps Sweden ... that was the reason ... because it was very original. It came from inside.' Olof Gummerus, interview with Cynthia Plaut, op. cit.
33. This strategy was also used by Tapio Wirkkala in his design for the display in the Finnish pavilion at the Brussels World Fair of 1958. The architect of the building, Reima Pietilä, had built an elaborate and impressive system of skylights that Wirkkala controversially had blacked out. More recently, at 'Scandinavia. Ceramics and Glass in the Twentieth Century', held at the V&A in 1989, I remember the same effect in operation.
34. The Builder, 1 December 1961, 'Finlandia' file, National Archive of Art and Design, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
35. Letter from G. Z. Goldberg '(Mrs)', 4 December 1961, 'Finlandia' file, The National Archive of Art and Design, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
36. M. H. Middleton, 'Modern art in Finland', The Spectator, 25 December 1953. It is a story that capitalized on the notion that Finland was impoverished. This was propagated by Gummerus to rather gullible journalists in order to account for the attenuated shapes of many of the vases on display. He thought it very amusing that they had been taken in.
37. I have elided two quotations here. The first is from a letter written by Wakefield to Gummerus, the second is from the press release for the exhibition (likely to have been written by Wakefield, or at least overseen by him). 'Finlandia' file, The National Archive of Art and Design, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
38. Häyrynen, 'The kaleidoscopic view: the Finnish national landscape imagery'.
39. http://kirjasto.sci.fi/runeberg.htm.
40. Häyrynen, 'The kaleidoscopic view'.
41. Barnett Freedman, Review of Modern Art in Finland Exhibition, Arabia archive, Helsinki, n.d.
42. Freedman, op. cit.
43. Rouve, op. cit.
44. S. Vihma, 'Objects for everyday life', in Aav & Strizler-Levine, op. cit.
45. M. Aav (ed.), Tapio Wirkkala: Eye Hand and Thought, Werner Söderström, 2000.
46. Klinge, 'Runeberg's two homelands'.
47. 'Design in Finland', The Guardian, 15 November 1961.
48. Aav, op. cit.
49. Christian Science Monitor (London edn.), 12 December 1961.
50. There is a very clear male bias in this quote. However, in Finnish the third person singular has no gender division, which does not mean that Finns make no distinction between the sexes, but it does mean - since this quote probably has a Finnish source - that the gender has been added in translation. Most Finnish designers in positions of responsibility were male, whereas potters and weavers or textile designers were more frequently female. However, I am not convinced that it is safe to deduce that the guardians of the secrets of Finnish design were automatically men.
51. Christian Science Monitor, op. cit.
52. H. Kalha, 'The other modernism', in Aav & Strizler-Levine, op. cit.
53. Klinge, op. cit. It has also been pointed out that this national identity was created generally by and for a Swedish-speaking middle and upper class, of which Gummerus was a member. In his interview with Cynthia Plaut it is possible to detect quite a patronizing tone towards Finnish-speaking Finns in general and Wirkkala in particular.
54. 'The springs of Finnish design', Finnish Design, Finnish Foreign Trade Association, 1960, loose-leaf insert.