PORI ART MUSEUM INAUGURAL EXHIBITION – ART FROM THE COLLECTION OF MAIRE GULLICHSEN ART FOUNDATION
Despite its significance, Maire Gullichsen’s art collection emerged almost as a byproduct of her other artistic activities. The artworks within it serve as milestones in the landscape of Finnish art, tracing back to the 1930s.
The early phases of the collection evoke the founding of the Free Art School in 1934. Maire Gullichsen was not only one of its first students but also the driving force behind its creation and the shaping of its vision: the school’s activities were to be free from all academic constraints; teachers were chosen for short periods to prevent them from overly directing the students’ development. However, all instructors shared a common admiration for the tradition of French colorist art. Thus, from its early years, the Free Art School became a center for internationally oriented art thinking.
Close ties to contemporary French art soon led to exhibitions of modern French art, initially organized at Artek, which was founded around the same time as the Free Art School, and eventually at the dedicated Galerie Artek established after the war. The major exhibition of prominent French modern masters held at Helsinki’s Kunsthalle in 1939 inspired the founding of the Association for Contemporary Art. This laid the groundwork for the environment in which Maire Gullichsen’s art collection gradually took shape.
Maire Gullichsen’s collection was not consciously “constructed”; it evolved. The aim was not to build a museum collection, but rather, the acquisition of pieces was driven by a personal affinity for the works, momentary impulses, and sometimes even a desire to secure the livelihood of the Galerie Artek, which was dear to her. Just as the Pori Art Museum is dedicated to contemporary art, Maire Gullichsen’s collection is a collection of contemporary art, with an increasing focus on contemporary works over the years. The oldest pieces in the collection, in terms of their date of creation, were also among the earliest acquisitions. Some of Maire Gullichsen’s first art purchases were watercolors from Magnus Enckell’s color period. These acquisitions already indicated the direction in which the future collection would develop: exploring the possibilities of color and its expression. Among older artists, Helene Schjerfbeck’s Pumpkin Still Life, T.K. Sallinen’s sharply blue spring landscape from 1914, and Ellen Thesleff’s works from her colorist period are brilliant examples of this focus.
In the art of the 1930s, a strong opposition existed between the national and the international. At that time, internationalism primarily referred to colorist art rooted in post-impressionism, as represented by Rabbe and Torger Enckell, Sam Vanni, and Yngve Bäck. But it also included more surrealist elements, echoed in the paintings of Sulho Sipilä, or cubist-influenced modernism seen in Olli Miettinen’s early 1930s works. All of this is represented in Maire Gullichsen’s collection, albeit with only a few but carefully selected examples. Among the mentioned artists, all except Olli Miettinen also served as instructors at the Free Art School.
As early as the 1930s, Maire Gullichsen organized several exhibitions by Fernand Léger at Artek and even invited him to lecture in Finland. The legacy of Léger and the constructive painting movement began to draw Maire Gullichsen’s interest in Finnish art during the 1950s. The undisputed leader of this school, Sam Vanni, has been a long-time friend and often a collaborator with Gullichsen in organizing Artek’s exhibitions. As an artist, he is also well-represented in the collection, which is now being shown in its entirety to the public for the first time. It is only natural that when the need arose to clarify the general character of the collection in connection with the museum project, the primary focus of acquisitions became concretist art. Works by Unto Pusa, Ernst Mether-Borgström, L.-G. Nordström, B.J. Carlstedt, among others, form a solid foundation within the collection, alongside the works of many younger concretists.
However, a certain tension in the collection is created by the presence of another, contrasting, more romantic trend. This trend has its roots in the aforementioned Spring-Winter by Sallinen, continuing through the works of artists in the October Group like Sven Grönvall and Aimo Kanerva. Finally, this connection to domestic roots and the experience of nature finds expression in the collection’s sculptures, particularly in the use of natural materials in the granite sculptures of Harry Kivijärvi, and the wooden sculptures of Mauno Hartman and Kain Tapper.
Maire Gullichsen’s donation of her Finnish collection to the city of Pori as the foundational collection of the Pori Art Museum significantly accelerated the city’s art museum project. The completion of the new art museum now provides a crucial foundation for developing a dynamic art scene that spans the entire country.
(From the publication Maire Gullichsenin Taidesäätiö, essay From Kokoelmasta museoksi by Salme Sarajas-Korte, published by the Pori Art Museum)
Translated with ChatGPT