Tove Jansson is known and loved around the world as the creator of the rotund children’s characters, the Moomins. However she always considered herself first and foremost a painter and the fact that this side of her work was often ignored caused her great frustration and sadness. Adventures in Moominland at the Southbank Centre in London and another exhibition of her art, currently in Stockholm and arriving at the Dulwich Picture Gallery next year, allow us to see both sides of her extensive oeuvre. Although vastly different in approach, both exhibitions emphasise the tolerance which imbues her work and which derives from the courageous way she chose to live her life, refusing to submit to the restrictive norms of contemporary Finnish society. [...]
It was the horrors of that time that also served as inspiration for the first Moomin books. “She had to create alternatives to the world she was living in,” says Jansson biographer Boel Westin. Not that this alternative was any less bleak. The Moomins and The Great Flood contains images of refugees searching for their relatives while Comet in Moominland, completed just after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sees the residents of Moominvalley facing possible annihilation from a comet hurtling towards earth. Her characters are granted happy endings but all the same, “they’re quite exceptional for children’s books at that time,” says Westin. [...]
Jansson returned to the Moomins in 1965 with Moominpappa at Sea, which deals with her troubled relationship with her father. Feeling as if he is not needed, Moominpappa behaves with uncharacteristic chauvinism in whisking his family off to an uninhabited island to prove his worth. Moominmamma, who Jansson had always said was based on Ham, is so homesick that she paints countless pictures of Moominvalley, which miraculously come to life.
No comments:
Post a Comment