Since their first appearance in the 1940s, the Moomins have grown to be a worldwide phenomenon. The books have been translated into over 50 languages, there are have been numerous TV series and movies, as well as plays and an opera, and there are currently several Moomin Worlds, all based on the slender tales of these harmless little cartoon characters who live in the remote and enchanted Moomin Valley.
Dulwich Picture Gallery is currently hosting a wonderful, beautifully staged and life-affirming exhibition which aims to set the phenomenal worldwide success of the Moomin characters in the broader context of the career of their creator, Finnish artist Tove Jansson (1914 to 2001).
The exhibition brings together 150 works to show how, as well as creating the Moomins, Jansson was also a successful painter – creating striking self-portraits as well as experimental landscapes – a caricaturist and a book illustrator.
Oil paintings
The exhibition opens with a room of Jansson’s oil paintings, portraits of lovers and of her family and some of the many self-portraits she painted of herself, striking various poses, exuding a rather unsmiling air of purpose and self-confidence.
Lynx Boa (Self-Portrait) (1942) by Tove Jansson. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Yehia Eweis © The Estate of Tove Jansson
She came from a family which understood and supported her artistic aims. Her mother was an illustrator, her father was a sculptor and her two brothers also became artists. She had a very thorough artistic training, studying at art schools in Stockholm, Helsinki, then Paris.
During this time she experimented with contemporary styles of oil painting – the portrait of Maya is an essay in Gauguin, while another self-portrait is all angles and shadows like a Vorticist work. But the core of her style is a kind of modern realism, epitomised by this group portrait of her family, featuring her two younger brothers playing chess.
Family (1942) Tove Jansson. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Hannu Aaltonen
She hoped this would be treated as a masterpiece but the critics weren’t that keen. It was a good thirty years since Picasso, Matisse and the rest had revolutionised western art. In this context, it’s a very conservative work, and also rather a mish-mash. The faces of the mother, father, older boy and Tove’s own face all seem like they’ve been done in different styles. (Also, I was slightly irritated that I couldn’t make out the position of the pieces in the chess game. What’s the point of painting a chess game if you can’t see the pieces?)
War and satire
Born in 1914, Jansson came to adulthood in the ominous atmosphere of the 1930s, and witnessed the Soviet attacks on Finland in 1939. When Hitler’s Germany invaded Soviet Russia in 1941, Finland allied with the Nazis, and Finnish troops took part in the 872-day siege of Leningrad.
As might be expected her family, and Jansson, were strongly pacifist and throughout this period she worked as a caricaturist for the Finnish satirical magazine, Garm. There is a good selection of the cover illustrations she drew for Garm in a display case. They are extremely good, well designed, well drawn, and, above all, funny. In this cover illustration from 1938, Hitler is the spoilt cry-baby being offered choice bits of Europe to try and stop his bawling.
Cover illustration of Garm No. 10 (1938) Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Jenni Nurminen
It was handy that Jansson’s artist mother had herself worked for Garm since it was established in 1929. All through the exhibition we are told what a strong, independent woman Jansson was, but it certainly helps your ‘independence’ if you have well-connected, sympathetic, comfortably-off parents to get you jobs and support your career.
Still, the covers are not only hilarious, they get better – better drawn and more sophisticated – as they go on. There’s a good one from 1943: as the war turns against Germany, posh people in suits are depicted rowing boats away from a swastika sinking in the sea. There’s a bitterly satirical one from the end of the war showing a Heath Robinson-style big industrial contraption, with black-faced evil Nazis entering at the bottom, passing through various cranks and cogs, and emerging as white-faced angels flying about the sky at the top! Yes, it’s time to forgive and forget 🙂
The one below, published as the Germans were retreating on all fronts in 1944, shows cartoon Hitler looting Europe.
Cover illustration for Garm (1944) by Tove Jansson. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Yehia Eweis
The clarity of line, and the stylisation of Hitler, remind me of the political cartoons of David Low, who published cartoons in the British press through the 1930s and 1940s.
David Low, Evening Standard (8th July, 1936)
I like cartoons so I loved these Garm covers. Jansson’s work should definitely be included in any books or collections about political cartoons of the 1930s and 40s.
The Moomins
If you look at the bottom right of the second Garm illustration, you can see Moomintroll hiding behind the ‘M’. Apparently Jansson sketched him as the result of losing a bet with her brothers. Initially he was called Snork. (Maybe this explains the similarity between the Snorks and the Moomins in the books.)
The Moomin story, the characters and their adventures, are so numerous and prolific that it is impossible to summarise. Briefly: they began as little extras in the Garm illustrations. Then Jansson developed comic strips, little sets of three or four pictures telling a story. These appeared in a Finnish left-wing newspaper for a while but it was only when the London Evening News (forerunner of today’s Evening Standard) signed a contract with Jansson after the war for a daily supply of cartoon strips, that they became famous. The exhibition devotes a lot of space to explaining how the Moomin characters evolved, and the commercial roots of them, giving examples of first drafts of the strips, sketches and rough workings.
The Evening News contract ran for seven years, being Jansson’s main source of income, and by the end the strip was being seen by twenty million people daily. The exhibition includes a wall full of fascinating of examples. What’s interesting is to see the Moomins – who in the books are targeted at pretty small children – taking part in grown-up comedy: it’s quite a shock!
Installation view of Tove Jansson at Dulwich Picture Gallery
And then, alongside the newspaper comic strips, Jansson began writing and illustrating book-length adventures for her cleanly-drawn, black and white biomorphic characters. The books, in order of their original publication, are:
1945 The Moomins and the Great Flood
1946 Comet in Moominland
1948 Finn Family Moomintroll
1950 The Exploits of Moominpappa
1954 Moominsummer Madness
1957 Moominland Midwinter
1962 Tales from Moominvalley
1965 Moominpappa at Sea
1970 Moominvalley in November
So, as you can see, there are 25 years between the first and the last book – a full generation – in which the tone and attitude of the books subtly changed, maturing and becoming more wistful.
The second half of the exhibition is predominantly about the Moomin characters (there is a display case of an early version of little figurines of the characters made by Jansson’s brother), their development, the premise and plotlines of each of the books, and wonderful evocative illustrations from each of them.
I read all the books when I was about 8 or 9 and every single book illustration is imprinted on my memory and carries me off into a lovely warm memories of childhood absorption in her wonderful fantasy land of Moomin valley, with its collection of eccentric and lovable characters.
It should be mentioned that the exhibition has been carefully designed to encourage younger visitors (there were loads of toddlers about when I visited). The walls of each room are painted vibrant primary colours (yellow, orange, green) and are dotted with large decals of Moomin characters, like Renaissance putti, watching over the visitors.
Installation view of Tove Jansson at Dulwich Picture Gallery
You can read about the Moomins elsewhere, there is no shortage of sites and sources for more information:
Moomin merch
Writing the books and the strips went alongside managing the increasing range of merchandise, which began appearing even in Jansson’s lifetime. As Andy Warhol said:
Business art is the step that comes after art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era people put down the idea of business. They’d say ‘money is bad’ and ‘working is bad’. But making money is art, and working is art – and good business is the best art.
And a lot of Jansson’s later energy was devoted to managing the growing Moomin empire, ensuring quality control for the various Moomin stage plays, operas, TV series, animations and spin-offs. This task has been taken over by her estate which keeps strict control of the Moomin images to this day.
Book illustrations
Coming off the back of this success as an illustrator of her own books, Jansson was invited to create illustrations for three children’s classics, Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1961) and Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (1959) and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1966).
The commentary says Jansson made some effort to distinguish these works from her Moomin illustrations, but I’m not sure she succeeds. The Alice illustrations are the least convincing. The Hobbit ones are bizarre, as we see Jansson’s essentially warm comforting style deployed on dragons, orcs and giants. There are some brilliant examples, I liked the one of the three giants, but if you google it you can see scores more.
Best of the three in my opinion are the illustrations for The Hunting of the Snark.
Sea paintings, late oils
Jansson had more or less abandoned oil painting during the war for the Garm work, and then moved seamlessly on to produce the ever-growing Moomin universe. But in the 1960s she had the time and money to return to oil painting, her first love. The exhibition includes a room of later oil works, including three interesting abstract works designed to convey the sea.
Abstract Sea (1963) by Tove Jansson. Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Hannu Aaltonen
They make heavy use of impasto or laying on the oil in thick wedges to create ridges and rifts of colour. They’re not really that distinctive enough to form a view. Three examples wasn’t enough; a room-full of her landscapes would have been interesting and useful (the other works in this room were still lifes and portraits), especially since the sea plays such a large part in the imaginative life of the Moomin books.
What they do convey, though, is the importance of the sea and lakes and water to Jansson. The audio guide includes a very useful 6 or 7 minute film summarising her entire life, and what this makes clear is what a happy, loving childhood she had. Every year her parents took her and her two brothers to the Finnish lakes where they played and frolicked all summer long. In adult life, Jansson rented a house on a remote island – Klovharun – among the Pellinge islands, and then built her own cabin where for the next three decades she and her partner, the graphic designer, Tuulikki Pietilä, lived and worked together. Her 1993 autobiography is titled Notes from an Island and is illustrated by Tuulikki.
This biographical film ends with a really wonderful bit of home film footage showing Jansson dancing on the top of a little ridge near the cabin, perfectly captured in silhouette. Just a normal person, not beautiful or thin and elegant, not a model or an actress, just a rather dumpy person like you or me who makes up her own Happy Dance and dances down towards the camera with a huge grin on her face.
It’s hard to imagine a more complete expression of contentedness and happiness. It’s wonderful.
For me the dominant theme of the Moomin books is tranquillity and acceptance. They describe great marvels and wonders – a comet rushing towards the earth, a great flood, the spooky silence of snow-covered mid-winter – and the Moomin family keep meeting all sorts of odd and peculiar characters – but they are never really afraid. All the oddity and adventure is calmly accepted by the eccentric Moominpapa and the supremely calm and practical Moominmamma. They stories are redolent of a warm and loving family, and I think that in the books and illustrations what comes over with great force is her happy childhood and warm supportive family life.
Adult fiction
It comes as no surprise to learn, then, that after her mother died in 1970, Jansson found herself unable to write any more Moomin stories. The special closeness she shared with her mother was broken; the untroubled happiness of Moomin Valley fell into shadow. (In fact a few large-format Moomin picture books did appear later – The Dangerous Journey (1977) and An Unwanted Guest (1980) – but the five big picture books are the triumph of pictures and design over text; they don’t have the imaginative intensity of the novels.)
And that’s when she turned to writing stories for adults, short stories and short novels. These have only slowly been translated into English (not all of them are yet available) and have established yet another string to her bow, as the ‘painter’ of charming, winsome tales of girls, childhood and femininity.
Novels
1972 The Summer Book
1974 Sun City
1982 The True Deceiver
1984 The Field of Stones
Short story collections
1968 Sculptor’s Daughter
1971 The Listener
1978 Art in Nature
1987 Travelling Light
1989 Fair Play
1991 Letters from Klara and Other Stories
Comments
Bright and lovely
This is a beautifully conceived and laid out exhibition, the bright colour of the walls and the Moomin decals lending it an innocence and charm entirely in tune with the subject matter.
The snug
Half way along the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s six room exhibition space is an odd circular room off to one side, a dimly-lit mausoleum commemorating the gallery’s sponsors, Sir Francis Bourgeois, Noel and Margaret Desenfans. For most exhibitions you simply walk past, but for this one the curators have put rugs and beanbags into the Mausoleum along with several library book holders full of Moomin books. This is where I lay to watch the video about Jansson’s life before it began filling up with toddlers. My advice to the curators: Put many, many more beanbags and rugs into the Snug – and some kind of heater: make it really snug.
Be happy
‘As happy as Tove’ should be a new proverb. What an extraordinarily talented woman. And what a gift to be able to channel her sense of warmth and security into a series of wonderfully reassuring, imaginative and beautiful stories.
Tove Jansson swimming © Per Olov Jansson
The video
Here is the show being previewed by Ian Dujardin.
For those who want more, BBC Scotland made an hour-long documentary about Jansson.
Moomin merch
There are over fifty items of Moomin merchandise for all your Christmas shopping needs.
Related links
- Tove Jansson continues at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 28 January 2018
- Moomin winter weekend
The moomin books
1945 The Moomins and the Great Flood
1946 Comet in Moominland
1948 Finn Family Moomintroll
1950 The Exploits of Moominpappa
1954 Moominsummer Madness
1957 Moominland Midwinter
1962 Tales from Moominvalley
1965 Moominpappa at Sea
1970 Moominvalley in November
Books & Boots 