Finnish modern design

Magazine Antiques, March, 1998 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Aalto's long and prolific career had a marked influence on architecture and industrial design around the world. His innovative buildings in Europe and the United States included museums, libraries, churches, factories, apartment buildings, private houses, and municipal buildings. The exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art includes approximately 175 sketches and drawings, 15 models, archival photographs, and examples of his furniture, glass, and bentwood sculptures. Video tours of several of his most important buildings are part of the installation, along with reconstructions of architectural elements. The latter include a wall made of wedge-shaped bricks from the House of Culture in Helsinki, a kiosk from the 1929 Turku 700th Anniversary Exhibition, and several wooden and tiled columns from his buildings. These elements are indicative of the innovative ways in which Aalto used traditional building materials.

In common with other modernists of his generation, Aalto designed his buildings to harmonize with their natural sites. He believed that technology did not have to be dehumanizing but could be utilized to elevate cultural values. Aalto was profoundly influenced by the Renaissance architecture of Italy, which he encountered when he traveled there in 1924. However, he was a strong advocate for the creation of a Finnish national style that would pay homage to the distinctive aspects of the country's vernacular tradition in architecture.

In the 1930s Aalto achieved international recognition largely through the furniture he designed, which was exhibited around the world. By the middle of the decade, with Maire and Harry Gullichsen, he founded Artek, a manufactory to produce his furniture designs. Concurrently he became interested in designing glass.

Aalto taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge during the 1940s. Following World War II he was a major force in reconstructing damaged and leveled buildings in Finland. His career flourished in the 1950s and 1960s, and he received a number of commissions outside Finland. Today his legacy lives on not only in his buildings, but also through the numerous objects he designed, some of which are still in production.

Bard's exhibition focuses on the six decades in which modernism became a catalyst for Finnish designers, who, in turn, influenced their counterparts around the world. Some 130 works include ceramics, furniture, glass, prints, lighting, metalwork and jewelry, commercial design, fashion designs, and textiles. In the early years of this century Finland's vernacular craft traditions were blended with progressive theories of design then in vogue on the Continent and in Sweden. The latter emphasized spare, natural forms related directly to the objects' function. While today many of these early designers of ceramics, glass, furniture, and textiles are not well known in the United States, the influence of their products on comparable objects made in other countries has nonetheless been considerable.

One of the most influential figures was Arttu Brummer (1892-1951), an interior architect, glass designer, critic, and most important, a teacher of design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in Helsinki starting in 1919. Between 1944 and his death in 1951 he was the artistic director of the school, shaping the careers of many of the artists and designers represented by works in this exhibition.

The arts and crafts style came to Finland in the first years of the twentieth century, where it was espoused by Brummer, who emphasized the artistic and highly individual side of design by insisting that designers and craftsmen were neither different from nor less talented than artists.

The catalogue of the Aalto exhibition is published by the Museum of Modem Art (telephone 212-708-9700) and distributed by Harry N. Abrams. Bard's exhibition catalogue (telephone 212-501-3023) is co-published with Yale University Press.