Lappi-kuvan muotoutuminen suomalaisessa kuvataiteessa ennen toista maailmansotaa

Abstract

This study portrays and analyses the changes which took place in Finnish visual arts picturing Lapland between the early 1800s and the Second World War. The research is based on the Lapland-oriented works of art, which are displayed in Finnish art museums and other important native collections. I consider the pictures from an intertextual point of view. They have spread fairly evenly around the country and comprise 145 northern pictures by 45 artists, most of whom lived outside the area of Lapland proper. I have felt it quite appropriate to limit the range of time pertained to in this study to the Second World War, since the war brought about many historical and cultural changes in Finland and especially in Lapland. In their Lappish pictures the artists were influenced by contemporary trends in Finnish painting: romanticism, realism, impressionism, expressionism, and classicism of the 1920s. Similarly, the composition of their landscapes was closely tied to the Finnish tradition of landscape painting. Of the varieties in landscape those with views of a fell in the summertime were the most popular scenes. Quite often the view was a 'cultural landscape', which showed human habitation or signs of work. This is how wilderness, often frightful by nature, was tamed or taken in control. People of Lapland were another important theme in the paintings, and particularly the Lapps and their way of life inspired the artists around the end of the 1800s and the early 1900s. However, interest in the Lapps began to falter in the 1920s, and in the 1930s they were rather rarely portrayed. At that time the prevalent attitude towards the Lapps was sociodarwinistic, a view according to which they were racially inferior to the Finns and as a people facing extinction. As the Skolt Lapps were considered Russian the interest in Lappish culture waned. The way the artists pictured the North reflected features familiar from the 1600s -remoteness, desolation, polar night, midnight sun and coldness. Lapland was the region of dark cold winter and light summer. Autumn and spring were exceptional seasons in pictures. The Lapps were shown in front of their huts or together with reindeer, wearing their traditional Lappish costumes. In art exhibitions the paintings aroused certain expectations concerning Lapland. Quite a few paintings were used to illustrate reading matter pertaining to Lapland, which also affected people's opinions and confirmed their earlier conceptions of the northern region.