RIVAGES DU NORD, JUNE 2003: AFFECTIVE KEYBOARD, TWENTY FINNISH POETS IN THE LIGHT OF SURREALISM

Review par Simone Grahmann

The work, consisting of three major sections, first presents the perception and reception of surrealism in Finland, then draws the portrait of two painters, Otto Mäkilä and Juhani Linnovaara, and concludes with a selection of poems and poetic texts by twenty Finnish poets, qualified as surrealist or close to surrealism.

Timo Kaitaro, in his essay entitled "About Surrealism in Finland; Misunderstandings, Delays, Emergence," affirms that there was never a surrealist group in Finland but that there was indeed surrealism in Finland. Although the first Finnish reception of surrealism was characterized by misunderstandings and it was necessary to wait half a century before seeing the first translations of surrealist texts, surrealism left traces in culture and literature. The author explains that at the time of surrealism's birth, Finnish cultural life was turned toward Germany; he deplores a lack of knowledge of art movements in general at that time. The exhibition of the Halmstad Group in Helsinki in 1934 finally gave the opportunity to see for the first time art relating to surrealism but critics did not always have precise ideas about it (it was rather linked to cubism). The painter Otto Mäkilä, qualified as surrealist by critics from the beginning of the 1930s, himself warns against a hasty rapprochement between his art and surrealism, despite the presence of surrealist stylistic traits in his work. Juhani Linnovaara, the only Finnish artist mentioned in the General Dictionary of Surrealism and Its Surroundings (BIRO/PASSERON, PUF, 1982), by his own admission, never "familiarized himself with Breton's doctrines and surrealism's theories." The author of the work cites some engraver artists whom he considers surrealist: Hannula, Nieminen, Rouvinen, Tammenpää.

It is only at the end of the 1940s that one can encounter in Finland writings that denote real knowledge of surrealism. The author cites Kurjensaari's study of 1950, the first work to present surrealism in detail to the Finnish public, but the works are not available in Finnish. In 1962 finally appears an anthology of modern French poetry by the poet and translator Aale Tynni with a selection of poems by French surrealists, and in 1970, the translation of the Manifesto of Surrealism is published. In 1992 appears the first university study on Finnish surrealism, and in 2001, the first work in Finnish devoted to French and international surrealism. The author announces the publication of the translation of Nadja and The Magnetic Fields as well as an anthology of surrealist poetry in French: Kirjo 4/2002 "Twenty French Surrealist Poets."

Then are undertaken "Attempts to Explain Surrealism," first by Aaro Hellaakoski who, in his "Essay on Surrealism," thinks that it is "quite certain that the exacerbated tone of surrealism is not realizable among us," that readers "are not ready for it, even less than elsewhere." He is convinced that surrealism is not a precisely defined phenomenon, that it appears to be a "movement of scope that is not very aware of itself or its objectives." The author even goes so far as to claim that this is an attempt to "flee reality" and replace realistic feeling with aesthetic feeling and realistic expression with aesthetic expression, while Breton never ceased to insist on the importance of exploring, shaping, changing reality itself and intervening in the course of the world and immediate existence. The author nevertheless persists in his questioning of surrealism's profound meaning: "But what is this particular hyper-realism that surrealists can give themselves as a goal?", to resign himself to the absence of clarity due to too great a variety of responses. He suggests that literary surrealism appears to be a sort of "trans-realism" expressed by relatively conventional means – or else "mystical hallucination" or again the "reflection of the unconscious guided by intelligence" and compares it to music due to an "abstraction built from pure abstractions." Apparently, the author means by abstraction what pertains to the mental, psychic domain but still simply theoretical as to the conception of a real society and existence. Utopia, perhaps, spiritual research, without doubt, but pure abstraction, certainly not since the surrealists sought a concrete and livable form of existence and explored all domains of the human for this purpose.

In his poetic text "What is Surrealism," the second author, Kari Saviniemi, takes up the questioning of the meaning of the surrealist adventure and gives a response in the manner of the surrealists themselves: "surrealism is a cosmos in full explosion on the plains of consciousness." And Kirsi Kunnas, in "Light of Surrealism," defines the movement as a way of looking and seeing both outward and inward: "it is like crossing a double-faced mirror."

In the second part are presented two surrealist painters:

First Otto Mäkilä (1904-1955) by Ulla Vihanta. To qualify the artist, the author remains prudent regarding the use of the term surrealist. Although he was the only artist to represent Finland at the Surrealism i Norden (Surrealism of the North) exhibition in Lund in 1937, the art critic Vehmas remarked that the surrealist characteristics of Mäkilä's painting were situated outside those of Breton's movement, namely an idealism that defends the spiritual and intellectual aspects of art as well as a certain neo-romanticism. Mäkilä's "spiritualist surrealism" – called by some "fantastic symbolism" – grew in an atmosphere of melancholy announcing the second war. His art expresses the suffering of a sage influenced by Schopenhauer and Maeterlinck and his criticism had another target. Mäkilä never lost confidence in culture and stood against a world that had forgotten the enchantment of Antiquity, its noble simplicity and silent grandeur. For him, life had become a sterile desert and its source had dried up for good. His thought marked by irony, chance, the absurd is already "contaminated" by post-war existentialism. It seems that he knew surrealism rather poorly despite a trip to Paris undertaken at the beginning of the 1930s, but without establishing real contacts with the surrealists. His succession contains little documentation relative to European surrealism. In 1945, in an interview, he specifies: "I don't want to freeze myself in surrealism, but if my state of mind requires it, I won't avoid it either." The essential thing in the artistic act is for him the effort toward the new and the expression of this new.

The second: Juhani Linnovaara, became aware of surrealism probably in the 1950s, particularly appreciating Dalí and Miró. If he affirms: "in everything that pleased me artistically, there is a kind of surrealism, with its share of mystery and inexplicable," he was above all sensitive to medieval art: the paintings of Bosch, Dürer and Memling, Bruegel whom he discovered during his travels in Europe; they "were the first 'surrealists' that I saw – and probably the most important for me."

The work ends with a selection of poetic texts: with the exception of poems by deceased authors, the poems were for the most part chosen by the authors themselves, summarily presented following the poetry.