Tallbacken (Helsingfors) (Tallbacken [Helsinki])

Signed Tove and dated -42.

Tallbacken (or Mäntymäki in Finnish) is a hill in the Tölö area of Helsinki, famous for its connection to dramatic events in Finnish politics. In 1930, despite a government ban, a May Day demonstration inspired by the Communist Party of Finland was held there, which was dispersed by mounted police. From 1948, only the Social Democrats marched to Tallbacken, while the Communist Party of Finland/Democratic League of the People of Finland gathered in Senate Square.

The otherwise idyllic area of Tölö, in central Helsinki, was well known to Tove Jansson. She lived a large part of her life in various kinds of studio apartments. Her childhood was spent in her parents’ studio home in Katajanokka, and later the family moved to the Lallukka artist’s home in Tölö, where Tove Jansson lived for the next few decades. Shortly after the end of the war, she moved to her own studio apartment at Ullanlinnankatu 1, which she first rented and later had the opportunity to buy. For a young artist, her own space was necessary, but for a (homosexual) woman it was especially important. In a diary entry from 1944, Tove writes about the war-torn attic apartment:

The first time I entered the new studio, there was an alarm and the artillery gave me a salute. I stood still and just watched, and was happy. The wind blew through broken window frames and collapsed stove pipes, and under the cracks in the walls lay large piles of mortar. Twelve windows looked out onto the light and it was high as in a church. I put the easel in the middle of the floor and felt complete happiness.

The years during the war were a, mostly, productive period for the artist Tove Jansson, and she can be considered to have had her breakthrough, as a visual artist, during these years. But the war years were also a difficult time. Family members were called up for military service, there was a shortage of materials, and a threatening atmosphere was constantly present in everyday life. Paul Gravett writes (in Illustratören Tove Jansson, 2022):

In the winter of 1939, when the older of her two brothers was in the army, the war made her completely lose faith in her painting: “it felt totally unnecessary to try to make pictures.“ Jansson, who was 25 years old at the time, could not bring herself to react to the Soviet Union’s first bombing of Finland, which was officially pro-German at the time, with anything other than a doom-saturated, monochrome watercolour depicting a scene of civilians fleeing along a street, all the colour is dissolved except for a red light showing the location of the bomb shelter.

Art, however, eventually offered a counterbalance to the surrounding reality and political tensions. To counteract her initial artistic block, she began writing a fairy tale about a remarkable character, which was eventually named: Moomin. She only finished half the story, however, before she had to put it aside to help support her family and friends to survive. However, when her brother Per Olov (1920 – 2019) was home on leave, in the spring of 1944, the desire to write returned and the story was finally brought to completion, in the new studio that was to be her home for many decades to come. During these years Jansson also painted landscapes from Helsinki and its surroundings. Most of her urban themes, like Tallbacken, were found on, what was then, the outskirts of the city. Apart from a few exceptions, there are hardly any indications in the artist’s production that indicate the presence of the war, and all the townspeople hurry up with their everyday chores, each in their own direction. According to, Jansson’s biographer, Erik Kruskopf, Tove’s art gave an idyllic and even harmonious picture of life during these difficult war years.

Provenance
Private collection, Finland (acquired in the 1950s).
By descent.
Bukowskis, Helsinki, “Helsinki Winter Sale”, 28 November 2021, lot 1348419. Firestorm (acquired at the above sale).

Copyright Firestorm Foundation