GETAWAY IT’S T
OSSED between clawing waves with only a wooden oar and magician’s top hat, Moominpappa embarks on a whimsical journey to find a distant lighthouse.
It’s 34 years since I read the story of a snouty patriarch who frolics with seahorses and befriends The Groke, a desperately lonely figure scarred with a permanent scowl.
But I do recall a handwritten inscription in my copy of Moominpappa At Sea, promising the Moomins would take me on a special adventure one day.
Now I’m standing in front of a first edition illustrated book sleeve, part of a 2,000-strong collection of drawings, triptychs and related paraphernalia on rotated display at the world’s only Moomin Museum, which recently opened in Tampere, a two-hour train ride north from Helsinki.
Since Finnish artist, sculptor and illustrator Tove Jansson published her first book in 1945, the magical Moominvalley has become a worldwide cult phenomenon; children are drawn to the playful, fanciful characters, while the droll humour resonates with an older audience.
Jansson’s Moomin work was donated to the Tampere Art Museum in 1986, after Helsinki City Museum declined the collection on the basis it wasn’t “proper art”. A temporary exhibition of 100 pieces in the Tampere gallery’s basement lasted for three decades, until structural damage resulted in an evacuation three years ago.
Moomin Museum Director Taina Myllyharju was given an “almost unlimited” budget to employ the best architects, artists and designers in her quest for creating a new space in the park-fringed Tampere Hall.
A reading library stocks the 12 Moomin books in multiple languages, and a shop sells themed postcards and stamps (conveniently, there’s a postbox on site) and exclusive merchandise given the seal of approval by Tove’s niece, Sophia Jansson.
“We even have the world’s only Moomin conservator,” Taina proudly proclaims.
Restoring the works, particularly the detailed triptychs Jansson worked on with her life partner, graphic artist Tuulikki Pietila, was a painstaking business. Often, the women would use anything they could find lying around in the Above: Sarah Marshall outside the Moomin Museum in Tampere, Finland. Below, l-r: A picture of Tove Jansson; inside the Moomin Museum; Jansson’s work ‘Electricity, and the red brick industrial buildings of Tampere summer cottage they shared on the remote island Klovharu. These colourful 3D scenes were ephemeral snatches of imagination; they weren’t designed to last.
Crossing a wasteland on spindly, insect-leg stilts, Moomintroll and Sniff stare up at a cobweb-shrouded model schooner. The Jansson family heirloom forms the centrepiece of a tableau from the apocalyptic Comet in Moominland, which critics have linked to post-war gloom and the looming spectre of nuclear attacks.
As for the delicate charcoal, pen and watercolour drawings, they will never go on loan again, she insists, and lights are kept permanently dimmed in the two-storey exhibition space to preserve them.
Under the cover of darkness, I comfortably sink into the Moomin’s make-believe world, with the help of several interactive displays; inside a cavernous top hat, a projector bestows my shadow with loppy Sniff ears, and by waving my hands, I can throw bolts of lightning above a mural of ghostly, wide-eyed Hattifatteners.
From fireball comets hurtling towards Earth, to belligerent waves threatening to swallow the sky, Jansson was fascinated by the forces of nature. On her birthday, August 9, which also marked the museum’s official opening, she would swim in the sea with a crown of plaited flowers around her head.
So it’s fitting Tampere is a city connected to wilderness.
Two giant lakes sitting at different elevations create a source of hydroelectric power which has shaped the industrial ‘Manchester of Finland’. But the environment is