TOVE JANSSON – Return to Painting

Tove Jansson’s years as a comic strip artist brought her fame, success, and financial security. However, her passion for creating comics waned over the years, and she felt relieved when she stopped drawing the Moomin comic strip in 1959. The comic work had taken time away from her other artistic goals, and Tove longed to return to fine art. Now the opportunity arose. Jansson took her profession as a visual artist seriously, and in several interviews, she emphasized that she was, first and foremost, a painter.

Second Coming as a Visual Artist in the 60s 

Tove had organized her first solo exhibition as early as 1943, at nearly thirty years of age, and the feedback had been positive. However, her artistic production had become sporadic during the late 1940s and 1950s alongside other tasks. As a multi-talented individual, Tove constantly balanced the roles of writer, illustrator, and visual artist, and she certainly wanted to do everything. She had also struggled with the era’s view of art, where commercial illustration work was not considered as valuable as fine art expression. This serious approach to art was perhaps inherited from home, as the daughter to sculptor Viktor Jansson.

Tove began her second active period as a painter in the 1960s. Now she took up the brush with renewed vigor and held several solo exhibitions throughout the decade. She felt she was at a new beginning with her painting. A self-portrait she painted in 1959, she titled Beginner (Nybörjare), and she began signing her works with only her surname, Jansson, no longer using the name Tove. In her notebook, she wrote that she had painted more during the first four months than in the previous ten years combined.

Slowly Towards Abstraction 

New movements dominated the art scene, creating pressure to shift towards abstract expression. Tove was not swept away by fashion trends but held fast to to traditional representational art. She transitioned to abstraction gradually by simplifying her motifs. The colors intensified, and the size of the canvases grew. Tove’s admired friend and teacher, Sam Vanni, had moved to abstract art as early as the beginning of the 1950s. Tove created her completely non-representational works about ten years later. However, she did not completely abandon the visible reality but varied the degree of abstract expression. Often the starting point was a concrete subject, and she included recognizable elements in the painting. The titles of the paintings often referred to a narrative content or a concrete pictorial object.

In the painting Window view (1965), currently at auction, a suggestive cityscape emerges from a composition of controlled color saturation and simplified forms, with a dome seeming to rise in the background. Window frames delimit the pictorial space, and glowing red apples lying on a table are visible in the foreground. In her studio, Tove worked on interiors and window views, blending imagination and reality. The subjects were sometimes loosely based on various memories from trips abroad as well as mental images of everyday environments. At other times, the subject depicted a specific real cityscape more precisely. The work can be viewed as a skillful color study, where the suggestive elements leave room for interpretation.

 

Litterature: 
Erik Kruskopf, Kuvataiteilija Tove Jansson 1914-2001. WSOY, 1992-2002. 
Tuula Karjalainen, Tove Jansson Tee työtä ja rakasta, Tammi, 2013.