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| Tove Jansson, illustration from Moominland Midwinter (1957). Photo: Finlands Nationalgalleri/Ainur Nasretdin. © Tove Jansson/Moomin Characters. |
I started as a painter, and I am in some ways still a painter, and
it was the holiest and most important of all things. And then suddenly when one
makes an ugly figure with a large nose everyone starts clapping.
– Tove Jansson (1991)
Finn Family Jansson is gathered around
a pernicious game of chess played with pieces red as blood. In the midst of the
powerful tableau is the painter of the work – the Central Scrutiniser – in a
black coat, mittens, a fur hat; a stern Modigliani face. The always exceptionally
family-centred Tove Jansson (1914–2001) is the one who wants to walk away here.
The parents’ studio at the Lallukka Artists’ Home in Helsinki is pictured like
the submarine of Captain Nemo – a vexing atmosphere of art and fear. It is her
younger brothers Lars and the uniformed Per Olov who play chess. In front of
the mirror in this Renaissance composition is a fangy monstrosity in a vase, an
unfamiliar flower creature, with Signe and Viktor on each side. The artist has
written “Nazi” upside down in bold letters on the newspaper that her father is
squeezing under his arm. Sointu Fritze – Chief Curator at Ateneum (part of the
Finnish National Gallery in Helsinki), the organising institution of the just
wonderful Tove Jansson: Desire to Create
and Live at Millesgården in Stockholm – points at The Family (1942): “Per Olov went to the front as a volunteer and
the mother was outraged because she did not want to lose her son, and she looks
very angrily at the father. Here of course you have parts of the Moomin family.”
“Tove sublimated her own
difficulties by transferring them to the Moomin figures. She was unable to show
anger, but Little My did, and Snufkin could just walk away from it. Tove
couldn’t,” expresses Per Olov Jansson in the BBC programme Moominland Tales: The Life of Tove Jansson (2012). “It was not a
choice in the strict sense,” as Tove Jansson told it on television in 1991, “but
I think it was more that I tried to find my way back to those happy summers
when I was little. It is not that I have written for any particular audience; I
wrote because I wanted, and blatantly for myself.” In 1968 she argued with
equal measures of humour and frankness that “It has to be a kind of
backwardness that makes a person sit down and write children’s books. I
strongly suspect that something is wrong. I wonder really what it is that one
is looking for when a writer uses those innocent kids. Simply to venture into
the lost world of security, excitement, all the things that you experienced
when you were little, the expectation and the thrill of fear, the immense
relief, the immense joy – all the things that are smoothed out later in life –
intensity. I think that the happy endings are written just for me.”
Tove Jansson’s words that “It is an
ingenious form of self-defence to take the sting out of both danger and
triviality” form the recurring, if underlying, theme at the beautiful
Millesgården. Presented is a very clever decoction of the huge jubilee
exhibition in 2014 of Tove Jansson’s art at Ateneum, and this thing will be on
the move until at least early 2018. In terms of images, her inimitable Moomin
illustrations (as well as the sketches) are delicious things that surpass
everything else that she did. What a rare master she was of the medium: perfect
pitch and emotion, the philosophical depth and the darkness, the whimsy, the
light at the end of the tunnel when the self-scrutiny is done, for the time
being. And the more bored she was of this fantasy world that she had created,
the better and more profoundly she pictured it. (It would have been desirable
to see a few of the originals from Jansson’s picture book masterpiece Who Will Comfort Toffle? of 1960 included
here.)
You sometimes have to take the
sugar with the spice with Tove Jansson. Sleeping
Among the Tree Roots (1930s) is a picture of hibernating “trolls” coiled up
in their black cavities, safe from the ferocious world on the outside. They have
stuffed their tummies with spruce needles like the Moomins would do through
their winter sleep. They are proto-Moomins – Jansson’s uncle told her that a Mumintroll was living in his pantry when
she was studying art in Stockholm in the early 1930s, and she imagined it as a bulky
cross between Immanuel Kant and a hippo – seeds for a world that one day will be
ridden of war. Bear in mind what she wrote in the almost biographical Sculptor’s Daughter (1968): “the best
thing of all is to sit high up in a tree, that is if one isn’t still inside
one’s Mummy’s tummy”.
Two undated (1930s) surrealistic
paintings in the exhibition are purely fantastic, by any comparison. Mysterious Landscape is a state of mind
painted as a widescreen landscape dissipated from reality and yet so very accurate.
The brown, contaminated Landscape
(Picnic) is another eternal autumn, with a group of people looking like
uneasy actors gathered around absolutely nothing at all to eat. As for the galling
grotesqueries of the six hundred political caricature drawings that she produced
for the magazine Garm during fifteen
years of pre-war and full-on war misery, they changed in tone towards the end
and little by little. Jansson’s own signature figure, a cute grouch she called Snork,
was a Moomin precursor that made its first public appearance in the April 1943 issue,
under an umbrella.
Her pro-German father was not happy
when her cover of the Führer as a lollypop kiddie demanding “More cake” – in
the form of sliced up countries from his kindergarten attendants – turned up in
the autumn of 1938. Another one of these artworks in the exhibition is the rowboats
cover from the November 1944 issue, with fellow lives hopelessly sucked in by a
swastika sea mine. It is the same desperation here as in Oskar Kokoschka’s The Bride of the Wind (1913), in which
we find “der tolle” Kokoschka lost at sea in a tiny boat on the roaring waves
with a sleeping Alma Mahler nestling on his shoulder. We know that they are
going to die.
“Tove Jansson was a universal
genius with an irresistible desire to express herself,” argues her authorised biographer
Boel Westin in Tove Jansson: Life, Art,
Words, adding that, “all through life she works on the book about herself
in pictures and words”. Westin has a fine description in her essay in the catalogue
about Jansson’s immense love for the small islands in the Pellinge archipelago
east of Helsinki, and how that rich and limited life – always from early spring
to late autumn – affected so much of her writing:
“The island is a throbbing life
form, a place where people are looking for arguments and renew them, a topos in
the classical rhetoric. One can think of the island of the Hattifatteners in Finn Family Moomintroll [1948] that
rises out of the sea ‘wild and enticing’, the colonists’ island in The Exploits of Muminpappa [1950]
‘created as a heart’, or of the island of The
Summer Book [1972], visually depicted as a living thing […] In Moominpappa at Sea [1965], Tove Jansson
unites the idea of the island with Muminpappa’s yearning beyond the limits of Moominvalley. He sets his inner compass towards the lighthouse on the
island in the outer archipelago, towards an island so small that, in Little My’s
words, it just looks like a fly poop on the map.”
Her winter address since 1944 was Ulrikasborgsgatan
1 in Helsinki, a Moominhouse apartment-castle without a kitchen or a bathroom
but with a studio space with six metres to the ceiling, preserved as she left
it when she passed away in 2001. The toilet walls are papered with magazine
pictures of disasters, stormy seas and ships in distress. “Ever since I was a
very little girl, our family lived out on the islands. And it has been hugely
important in every way. For instance, I would never have ventured into writing
– I was an artist – if it wasn’t for those happy summers in the archipelago,”
she told Swedish Yle, the Finnish public broadcaster for the five per cent of
the Swedish-speaking population in Finland to which she of course belonged –
that special way of speaking provided the Moomins with their (deceptively)
mellow voices. “The recurrent friendly disasters in my stories where nothing is
lost really had to do with the fact that my dad was in such a terribly good
mood when there was bad weather. If the waves were high enough, he took us out to
sail. Then we knew that dad was happy, finally.”
Tove Jansson built her sea
paintings quite like her Moomin illustrations, with a delightful staccato of
dashes. However, while her sensitive marker pen illustrations are works of headstrong
originality and beauty beyond belief, her paintings always tended to go to
places with a cluster of French old footprints; they are a bit of this and a
bit of that, and it has to be said that it is mostly only in her self-portraits
that we will find Tove Jansson. She is grasping an umbrella with her paws in The Lynx Boa (Self-Portrait) (1942) – “I
look like a cat in my yellow skin, with cold slanted eyes and my new, smooth
hair in a bun,” she wrote to a friend – here is the fairly young artist
revealing herself with finesse and substance, and a style of her own. The early
paintings are signed “Tove” and the later ones “Jansson”, as in her final
“ugly” self-portrait from 1975 in which she presents herself like an aged fauve
(she was only sixty-one) and with the painted transparency of a jellyfish.
In 1946, Jansson found herself in
quite a pickle when she fell in love with a married soon-to-be theatre
directrice. “Not only was she very bold when she criticised Stalin and Hitler
and totalitarianism. When she makes these two huge murals showing her first
female lover, Vivica Bandler, it was during a time when homosexuality was still
a criminal offense. I would say that these murals represent a bridge between
her free painting and the Moomin illustrations,” says curator Sointu Fritze in
front of the photographs of these gambolling frescoes, painted for the
restaurant in Helsinki’s City Hall (you will find them in the Helsinki Art
Museum today), with men depicted as statuesque dandies and the lovely young
women as Botticelli angels in gorgeous dresses. The world was young again. People
are dancing, and so is Vivica, with a male partner – alone at a table is Tove
and her Moomintroll. Bandler, while abroad, received a letter during the completion
of the work in 1947: “I know that the whole of my painting is going trough a
process of change right now, becoming stronger and more alive, and this is
thanks to you. Lines and colours are not enough if there is no expression and
sap and intensity in them, even if it is the intensity of despair.” Tove is Thingumy
and Vivica is Bob in Finn Family
Moomintroll, and they walk hand in hand trough life with a big stolen ruby
(their love) and a secret language that only they can understand.
Tove Jansson was made in Paris in
the autumn of 1913. Her Swedish mother Signe Hammarsten (“Ham” to everyone
including her children) and her Finnish father Viktor Jansson (“Faffan”) met
each other at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse in 1910. The
family’s first city home at Lotsgatan 4B in Helsinki was – like the Moomins – “a
mix of bohemianism and bourgeois”: “We lived in a shabby, beautiful old studio,
an environment that is fun for a child. The atmosphere was very easy-going, they
were friendly, life was carefree. Of course they had difficulties, it was very
complicated but you couldn’t tell,” as Jansson chose to remember her childhood.
The parents built shelves for the children to reside on since the studio was so
small. From her elevated position Tove used to participate in her father’s
drunken gatherings with his male colleagues (women were not allowed). “It made
me realise that these incomprehensible artists have to party,” she said.
“Tove’s mother had explained to the
children that during the Civil War [in early 1918] something had snapped in
their father and created irreparable cracks in his soul. Through the war, the
once sunny-tempered, playful and amusing Viktor changed into an austere and
embittered man, inflexible in his opinions. He smiled only on the rarest of
occasions and in other ways found it extremely hard to express his feelings,”
explains art historian Tuula Karjalainen in her book Tove Jansson: Work and Love. “Yet Tove admired her father
tremendously, and in her art she depended on his views.” Between the lines
there was always a cloud to every silver lining in Jansson’s “carefree”
childhood. In her vivid diary she wrote: “I see how Faffan, the most shiftless
and most short-sighted of us all, tyrannises the whole house, I see that Ham is
unhappy because she has always said yes, smoothed things over, given in, given
up her life and not got anything back except children, whom the men’s war will
kill or make into bitter, negative people.”
What most hurt her about the cumbersome,
philandering, alcoholic father was his opinion about Jews. Tove’s dearest
friend the Jewish photographer Eva Konikoff had to leave Finland in 1941. In
one of the many richly illustrated letters that Jansson sent to Konikoff in the
United States she wrote: “I can see what would happen to my work if I get
married, I would become either a bad painter or a bad wife. And I don’t want to
give birth to children, only for them to be killed in some future war.” There
were men in Tove Jansson’s life. After her loud dissatisfaction with the much
traditional art courses in Stockholm, Helsinki, Paris (three schools) and Rome,
Jansson turned to the Finnish (and Jewish) artist Sam Vanni for private
tutoring. She confided to her diary: “When it began to get dark, Samuel
gathered his brushes together, and with a joy that hurts, I would look at his
pictures and tell myself, ‘It couldn’t be so beautiful if he didn’t love me.’”
In Comet in Moominland (1946) – the first true Moomin book and also
one much revered by the connoisseurs, published only two years after the Nazis
brought devastation to her country – we encounter the Edenic Moominvalley for
the first time through the words of Tove Jansson: “It was a wonderful valley,
full of happy little animals and flowering trees, and there was a clear, narrow
river that came down from the mountain, looped around Moominhouse and
disappeared in the direction of another valley, where no doubt other little
animals wondered where it came from.”
“The war changed everything,” says Sointu
Fritze. “And somehow it is very logical that the alien worlds that she describes
in her surrealist paintings in the 1930s are the worlds that we meet in
Moominvalley.” Tove Jansson expressed in a 1966 interview how she saw the
child’s world as a fickle landscape of vibrant colours, clear logic and surreal
circumstances: “It is an exciting world in many ways, maybe even more when one
has left it, and only very rarely is given access to it again.” She gleaned her
knowledge of children – or “kids” as she always called them (she often found
them very selfish and at times macabre) – from the two thousand letters she
received and replied to every year after the Moomins had become an
international phenomenon. “Sometimes I wonder why people who have come quite a
long way from childhood suddenly begin writing fairy tales,” she wondered in that
interview. “Perhaps it is an attempt to release a surplus, the childishness
that doesn’t have a place in adult society, or an effort to depict something
that is being lost.”
Roger Ross Williams’s tragic and
hopeful documentary Life, Animated
(2016) is about Owen Suskind who disappeared into a world of his own at the age
of three, and only started to speak again in his adolescence through the voices
of the sidekick figures in animated Disney films. Tove Jansson devised a family
of her own imagination with the Moomins, she found her way through this odd
bunch of characters, and she ventured into this world at cross purposes. “She
presented herself quite differently in the shrewd essay ‘The Devious Children’s
Author’ of 1961, the most famous and quoted of her few texts about a matter of
personal concern. Here she discusses the drives of writing and presents a
self-image that is as far from an innocent Moomintroll or a dependable
Moominmamma that you can get. Behind the books is a self-centred writer who
writes children’s books for the benefit of her own childishness, least of all
for the children,” imparts her biographer Boel Westin. “But the really devious
author is not content with giving us the story of a Moomin family in a valley.
Inexorably she writes on, crushes dreams, empties the valley and sends the
family and herself into new realities and awakenings of various kinds.”
“Have you published this in
Finland?” someone asks Touko Laaksonen in the biopic Tom of Finland (2017). “It would be easier to publish these in the
Vatican,” is his terse reply. Tove Jansson’s early Moomin books were translated
into English long before the Finns accepted them. In January 1952, she received
a letter from London: “It has come to my mind that your Moomin family could
make an interesting comic strip, which would not necessarily be aimed at
children. It is obvious that the Moomin family appeals to children, but we
think these wonderful creatures could be used in comic strip form to satirise
our so-called civilised lifestyle.” It was from an agent of the Associated
Newspapers who soon appeared in Helsinki to contract Jansson for a series of
Moomin comic strips, and Jansson agreed to produce six strips a week from 1954
to 1959. London’s Evening News, which
was the biggest newspaper in the world at the time, ran it together with twenty
other papers around the world. The Moomins had twelve million readers when
everyone started clapping.
In the catalogue Paul Gravett speaks
of these strips as “the true heart of her life’s work”. But the strain from the
exigent workload, the fame, and more than anything else the Moomin business
that came with the global success made her fall apart. In 1957, Tove Jansson
wrote in her diary: “I have poured out my feelings at Moomintroll, but he is
changing. I no longer feel safe in my secret cage, it is trapping me inside.” Associated
Newspapers threw away most of the originals of her twenty-one long Moomin
stories, and the host of what we get in the exhibition is the sketches with the
at once sweet and strange Moomins as they, gradually, turn into muddled
personalities who only want to be left alone and grow potatoes.
“The seven years with the comic
strips were certainly not very gracious. It was almost as if I lost all desire
to all the Moomins not bound by contract. But once I arrived at turning
everything upside down, and instead of trying to describe this happy summer
veranda, I put Moomintroll in a completely different world – it was black and
dark and cold, a winter world. And he got on just as well there as I liked or
understood this comic strip world. And then the strange thing happened that
suddenly this Moomintroll developed some bravado. He experienced not only adventure
but also difficulties,” Jansson explained. “But thanks to this figure,
Too-ticky, he managed to come up with a solution to it all and was very, very
proud, and finally said in the book that ‘I am the first Moomin who have
experienced a whole winter.’ And that is how I was able to carry on with my
Moomin.” These rubies are forever.
Moominland Midwinter (1957) is Tove
Jansson’s book about finding love, and losing her heart to fellow artist Tuulikki
Pietilä, Tooti, Too-ticki. “It was almost as if their love was complete as soon
as they met,” writes Tuula Karjalainen. “They had met by chance in a Paris
nightclub when Vivica and Tove were travelling together, but now, in 1955 in
Helsinki, a love was born that was to endure for almost half a century, until
the end of their lives.” (Ateneum shows Tuulikki Pietilä’s graphic works in
2017 from February 28 to April 9.) In Helsinki, during wintertime, they had a secret
passageway through the attic between their studios. The rest of the year was
lived on Klovharun, a skerry not more than sixty metres long and thirty metres
wide with a tiny cabin and a midget lagoon on the absolute outskirts of the
archipelago.
Tove Jansson maintained that
excursion, not escapism, was the foundation of her artistic endeavours. But it
was completely necessary for her to escape fandom and telephones that rang
every second minute, so she created this most fundamental sanctuary (without
electricity or a toilet) on a fly poop on the map. “It is childish to say that
you would not be helped by success. But it can also be something horrendous
that stops one’s desire to work,” she said. “I think that people have a need to
admire, and it can be a bit tricky. I think it is so that people who admire
someone often get a sense of ownership, and that leads to quite a few mishaps
because it may well be that the person being admired wants to be left alone and
work.”
At Millesgården you can enjoy her watercolour
sketches for the Moominesque picture book The
Dangerous Journey (1977) as well as her illustrations for Lewis Carroll and
Tolkien. It is fascinating how she moved her compelling sense of the Finnish
landscape even into these authors’ works. (When the Norwegian director
Joachim Trier set his hardly original family drama Louder Than Bombs [2015] in a North American landscape it looked
like a Volvo commercial.) The only pair of things that don’t make any sense
with Tove Jansson were her apparently genuine appreciation for the perfectly
soulless and cutified animated Moomin
series, made in Japan in the beginning of the 1990s. She and her brother Lars
also wrote the script for the Swedish television series Moomintroll (1969), a thoroughly disturbing thing in which the Moomin
actors removed their gargantuan heads in the second episode and played the rest
of the show carrying these noodles under their arms.
“Are you Moomintroll?” The question
was raised by Swedish writer Margareta Strömstedt in the TV film Moomin and the Sea (1968) (the small
crew had to stay on Klovharun for twelve days due to the boisterous weather)
and Jansson’s response was instant: “No, no, I’m probably not one of those
figures. We have many common traits – as I have come to understand, gradually.”
And then, realising how human she had made him: “I begin to suspect Moomintroll
more and more, he is by no means a beautiful character.”
Yle aired “A Glimpse of Tove
Janssson” on June 30, 2001, just three days after her death. Here we find the multi-artist
listening to and commenting her own words from a Nagra tape recorder, once explaining
why she had to dismantle the Moomins: “The figures you are describing are
getting older, I cannot see that they develop, but they change the same way as
you yourself change as the years go by, and suddenly you do not write for kids
anymore. And then you have to stop – you cannot do a series because the kids
expect a series. It comes to a point when it turns into something else, and I
still regret that I could not continue to write about the Moomins, but it was
absolutely impossible. It would have been dishonest.”
She emptied Moominvalley in the
penultimate Moomin novel Moominpappa at
Sea. Tove Jansson’s much beloved mother (and with Pietilä a jealous
contender for her love) died in 1970 while she was writing on the last one, Moominvalley in November. Toft, the
lonely creature in the story, is Tove: “Every time he thought about Moominmamma
he got a headache. She had grown so perfect, so gentle and consoling that it
was unbearable, she was a big, round, smooth balloon without a face. The whole
of Moominvalley had somehow become unreal, the house, the garden and the river
were nothing but a play of shadows on a screen and Toft no longer knew what was
real and what was only in his imagination.”
Karjalainen: “After her father’s
death [in 1958], Tove was surprised to realise how much he had meant to her
mother. All her life Tove had wished she could rescue Ham from Faffan’s yoke.
She had planned to take her mother with her and move to a better place, or at
least to a land where there was colour, warmth and no perpetually demanding
husband.” Instead, she took her darling Tooti on a trip around the world in
1971. All the novels and short stories that she henceforth wrote were for
grownups. The world outside Mummy’s tummy was at times Edenic, especially on
Klovharun. The woman who was not Moomintroll looked the other way when Tooti
exterminated all the piss ants with kerosene.
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| Tove Jansson, The Family (1942). Photo: Finlands Nationalgalleri/Yehia Eweis. © Tove Jansson/Moomin Characters. |
Tove Jansson: Desire to Create and
Live at Millesgården in Stockholm through
January 22, 2017. The following venues are Göteborgs konstmuseum (February
11–May 21, 2017), Kunstforeningen Gammel Strand, Copenhagen (June 6–September
10, 2017) and Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (October 25, 2017–January 28, 2018).
