A revelatory journey beneath Moominland
Dulwich Picture Gallery Tove Jansson (1914-2001)
To those of us who read the Moomins stories when we were little, Tove Jansson is an instantly recognisable name as the creator of the lovable white creatures and their extended family.
If, like me, you know little more about her than that, Dulwich Picture Gallery’s new exhibition of the Finnish artist and her work – the first major UK retrospective – is a revelation. The show reveals a fierce, strong-willed woman with wide-ranging talent, who may have achieved worldwide fame but who nevertheless yearned for recognition as a serious painter.
It opens with Jansson’s selfportraits, landscapes and still-lifes. There are hints of the work for which she would become best-known in
Sleeping in the Roots, in which a family of cuddly white creatures huddle together underground, and in
Encounter, a dynamic, fantastical watercolour that captures the moment a maiden meets a mysterious rider on a white horse in a thunderstorm.
What is totally different are her works from the late Thirties and early Forties, which are almost Impressionistic – Jansson travelled widely in Europe in her youth, and had a long-lasting love for Matisse’s paintings. Her self-portraits, of which there are six in the exhibition, show an angular, supremely poised woman with flinty eyes suggesting unfathomable depths. In one she is wreathed in cigarette smoke, in another she wears a boa made from a lynx. Alongside these works appear a number of covers of the satirical magazine Garm – mincing Nazis here, a horrified Father Christmas there. Garm became a vital outlet for Jansson’s staunch opposition to war, fascism and communism, although look carefully and you also notice a long-snouted troll tucked into a corner – clearly a Moomintroll prototype.
Jansson as tormented artist continues in the second room, with a series of vivid, wild canvases – landscapes and still lives – paint thickly slashed on. She was, we learn, criticised for her painting, which was considered overly graphic, with too much emphasis on symbolism and narrative composition – although these, of course, were the qualities that made her illustration so masterful.
Halfway through the exhibition, the instantly recognisable works start to appear. They start with Jansson’s illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Hobbit and The Hunting of the Snark, work she took on to pay the bills. Although she sought to use a slightly different style for these illustrations, Alice still has a charming, wide-eyed quality reminiscent of Moomintroll, while Gollum – hairy, huge-eyed and hunched – could also comfortably inhabit Moominland. Ironically, though she may have yearned to be recognised as a serious painter, it is in these illustrations, and the later Moomin drawings, that we see Jansson’s unique ability: at once incredibly detailed yet also so simple, just a few pen-and-ink lines depicting a character, a stance, a mood.
The Moomins dominate the latter part of the exhibition – not only Jansson’s sketches and final drawings for the books, but a series of models of the characters, carefully crafted by Tuulikki Pietilä, Jansson’s life partner.
The final room is dedicated entirely to the cartoon strips Jansson created for The London Evening News, which were what brought her international fame. Here we see original artwork for the strip, long believed lost – and here we see Jansson’s painstaking process – each final strip is accompanied by the original pencil drawings and Jansson’s notes. The work eventually became so overwhelming that, after seven years, she handed the cartoon strip on to her brother Lars, who kept it going until 1975.
While the Moomins may still be the take-home of this exhibition, what it is very good at doing is showing what lies beneath those cuddly creatures. I left both fascinated by what I had learnt, but also wanting to know more about Jansson and her life. Just as, when you read the Moomin stories afresh, you notice hidden depths in their seemingly placid tales, so their author was more complicated than she might first appear.
Until Jan 28. Details: dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk