HELSINKI — In Tove Jansson’s first Moomins novel, The Moomins and the Great Flood (1945), the titular characters travel through a frightening forest before a rainstorm causes an epic flood, covering the land in danger and darkness. When the waters begin to recede, the Moomins find they have been swept into a beautiful fertile valley. They decide to stay. Published during the last months of the Second World War, it is easy to read the book as an allegory, with the flood representing the inescapable horrors of war and Moominvalley as an Edenic sanctuary.
As an outspoken pacificist, Jansson spent the war years and beyond both protesting conflict and seeking an escape from it. Tove Jansson: Paradise at Helsinki Art Museum captures both aspects of Jansson’s life and work, with a focus on her public art commissions from the 1940s through ’50s. Most of her paintings avoid depicting the realities of war, but two tiny, tatty-edged works on paper speak volumes. Both are city scenes inspired by her travels in Germany in the late 1930s, during which she witnessed the terrifying rise of Nazism. One features a prominent swastika flag, while the other depicts a murky street surrounded by oppressive black buildings. A crowd of shadowy figures moves towards a tiny dot of orange light in an open doorway; are they refugees fleeing toward the hopeful glimmer, or are they fascists rushing to stamp it out?
This is the world Jansson wished to escape, especially with an older brother fighting at the front. As she wrote to a friend in 1944, “I’ve never dreamt and planned as much as I have in these past few years. Not as a game — but as an absolute necessity.” As this exhibition shows, Jansson saw dreaming and playfulness as essential relief from the deprivations of war, which continued even after the armistice.
In bombed-out Helsinki and beyond, a government rebuilding program created opportunities for artists, and Jansson was able to earn a living for the first time through her Moomin comic strip and a series of public commissions. In both endeavors, she turned to images of paradise, forests, and fairytales to craft a unique imaginative world that appeals to adults as much as to children.
Moomin characters make cameos in many of her murals, such as her frescoes “Party in the City” and “Party in the Countryside” (both 1947). In the first of these, Jansson depicts herself gazing out at the viewer, her back turned defiantly on her lover Vivica Bandler, with whom she had recently broken up with acrimoniously. A little Moomintroll lurks on the table beside her, a mascot, perhaps, that represents a gateway to a more fantastical world.
Moomin characters feature more frequently in works designed explicitly for children’s spaces, such as her diptych “Fairytale Panorama,” produced for a kindergarten in 1949. The two paintings are delightful flights of fancy, crammed with whimsical details of princesses, magical landscapes, and fantastical creatures. But even here, as in all of her paradisal paintings, there are subtle hints of menace: Bats flutter, lightning bolts threaten a storm, and cats stalk hungrily. This is not pure escapism, but an expression of a state in which joy and fear are allowed to coexist.
Many of these murals, including the “Fairytale Panorama,” were made for specific sites and aren’t present in the exhibition. However, the recent discovery of several rolls of preparatory charcoal drawings at 1:1 scale in a corner of the artist’s studio makes some form of presentation here possible. These are not rough sketches but fully worked-out scenes, and merit viewing as artworks in their own right. With their monochrome shadowy strokes, they bear an accidental affinity to Jansson’s earlier sketch of a Nazi-ridden city, and certainly offer a more solemn perspective on the final vibrantly colorful frescoes, which are seen in projections alongside the drawings.
A handful of Jansson’s paradise paintings read uncomfortably through a contemporary postcolonial lens, such as one piece produced for a rubber company depicting idealized workers on a plantation. Another pair of paintings, probably produced in 1939 and 1940, are Gaugin-like in their delineation of an imaginary sunny Polynesian island populated by happily unclothed people. Jansson made a number of works in this style with the belief that they would sell and make her some much-needed cash during the brutal Winter War of 1939–40, during which the Soviet Union invaded Finland. She was mistaken; it turned out to be the Moomin comic strips and public commissions that provided her with both the creative and financial lifeline she needed.
Jansson’s cross-disciplinary oeuvre demonstrates a radical commitment to the profound necessity of play, dreams, and escapism. She took children seriously, which is reflected in the exhibition’s thoughtful, unobtrusive design. Paintings are hung low to the ground, Moomin creatures hide among the architecture, and there are doors to open and kaleidoscopes to look through. The exhibition — infused with the same knowing nostalgia as her works — is both comforting and subtly subversive.
Tove Jansson: Paradise continues at the Helsinki Art Museum (Eteläinen Rautatiekatu 8, Helsinki, Finland) through April 6, 2025. The exhibition was organized by Heli Harni.
