Alvar Aalto as an artist

During his childhood, Alvar Aalto's artistic inclinations found an outlet in quarters quite removed from architecture. For one thing he loved the theatre, and even set up a theatre of his own in the attic of his childhood home in Jyväskylä. He also had an unusual talent for painting and drawing. During his school years he studied with the best-known painter in his home town, Jonas Heiska. At the age of fourteen he was painting both landscapes and still-lives, and a little later was producing skilled, professional illustrations for the local paper, Keskisuomalainen. That he chose architecture as his life's work, despite this notable gift for painting, was probably due to his admiration for his father, who was a surveyor, and his maternal grandfather, who was a forestry officer and technical inventor. For the young Aalto, studies at the then Helsinki Institute of Technology, where these heroes of his had been trained, and contact with the exact sciences which had been their mainspring, were a necessity. On the other hand, he could not deny the attraction which artistic creation and the humanities held for him. Architecture was a compromise, or synthesis, which united both needs.

Nevertheless, the urge to paint was never suppressed. While he was studying at the Institute of Technology in Helsinki Aalto took private lessons in painting with the eminent artist Eero Järnefelt and frequented artistic circles at Brondin's café almost as much as those of the technological students at Ekberg's. His close friends included sculptor Wäinö Aaltonen and artists Henry Ericsson and Eemu Myntti. In 1921 he went to Riga in charge of an art exhibition; there he painted a whole series of water colours on local subjects which were included in an exhibition and put up for sale. In this context, Hufvudstadsbladet's reporter writes simply of 'Aalto, the artist".Shortly after completing his architectural training in 1921 Aalto became regular art critic on the evening paper Iltalehti, where he wrote about all major artistic events in the capital city up to the spring of 1922, when he was called up for military service. These articles give a clear idea of his taste at the time, and of the bases of his value judgements on painting. If we compare them with his own work, we get a fairly diversified picture of the aspirations of Aalto the draughtsman and painter.At the beginning of his career he was influenced fairly strongly by Albert Engström, whom he emulated both in the well-written columns he published in 1921 in the humorous magazine Kerberos and the portrait sketches he did the same year of the country people of South Ostrobothnia. In a touching and mildly academic way, he emphasised what was rustically picturesque in these characters. In 1922, as art critic, he got to know Antti Faven's more deeply psychological and artistically bold portraiture, and this awakened in him a new understanding of the personality of his models and an ability to catch them in unconventional poses. From then on portrait sketches, which depend so much on human interest and intuition, became Aalto's forte as a visual artist. He has left behind him brilliant portraits of his children, of his foster mother both during her old age and on her deathbed, and of his wife, Aino, during her final illness. The pen portraits of his CIAM colleagues, whom he amused himself by sketching during the tedious sessions of the international architectural congresses of the '30s, are masterly and entertaining; his subjects include Le Corbusier, Jose Sert and Siegfrid Giedion.
Aalto's painting started off with youthful experiments, evolving at times from Järnefelt's patriotic landscapes, from Carl Larsson's decorative countour style, or from the coloristic audacity of Grunewald. He applied himself, however, to the real ABC of modern art by composing ambitious still-lives a la Cezanne. Here he learnt a new concept of space, which was gradually to assume the utmost importance for his architecture. This concept rejects the absolute stereometric space, which earlier painters had projected mentally behind the canvass in the form of a central perspective, and along the lines of which the subject could be unambiguously suspended. Contemporary architects, too, worked on the bases of absolute space, placing their volumes alongside one another like building blocks. Cezanne taught Aalto the painter to lay the colour scheme on the canvas so that space emerged according to people's interpretative image-forming power. The result was an open, indefinite space, with scope for tension, harmony and potential conflict, quite different from that in the absolute stereometric system. Speaking of the progress of modern architecture, Aalto often said, "it all started with painting," and in his introduction to the Villa Mairea in Arkkitehti No. 9, 1939, he points out that the space he is working with there has its roots in painting. In 1922, when he painted his Cezannesque still-lives, he was still a long way from this architectonic breakthrough, but he continued to paint, with the intuitive certainty that his efforts at painting were launching him as an architect.Aalto's contributions to Iltalehti as art critic show that he placed Sallinen highest among the Finnish painters. This was because Sallinen devoted himself to the Cezannesque concept of space but combined this with a strong feeling for the special nature of Finland. The paradox with Aalto is that he was our most internationally oriented cultural creator while at the same time his roots were deeply embedded in Finland. His own water colours from this time are quite close to Sallinen's, but Collin, too, was clearly a source of inspiration. There are consciously ugly urban subjects, strident Finnish landscapes and gloomy cubist views, e.g. of Porvoo cathedral. His sincere passion for classic beauty and cultural settings breaks forth, however, in lighter works, for instance, joyful summer pictures or boats in Jyväskylä harbour and monumental townscapes from Riga. Aalto's painting is still relatively unknown and a detailed review of his various periods can hardly be given before the material has been collected together and the different works compared. Some of his early works remained in his possession; today some of these are in his home on Riihitie, Munkkiniemi, and some are with his two children. Others are owned by his brothers' and sisters' heirs. But a large, uncharted number of paintings and drawings have disappeared to a fate unknown, given away to friends and acquaintances. It is in any case clear that Aalto's output as a creative visual artist decreased during the '20s as his architectural work absorbed his energy. It appears that he did not paint in oils at all during the'30s, and did only a few water colours.On the other hand, he continued to draw, sometimes portraits and sometimes landscapes, usually done during his travels. A sketchbook from the'40s and '50s remains, with drawings made on journeys in the USA, Spain, Morocco and Greece, and also from Lapland. Some of these are reproduced in the book Alvar Aalto, Sketches, published in 1972
.During the '40s Aalto started painting oils of quite a new type, probably spurred on by the abstract art he had seen at the worried fairs in Paris, 1937, and New York, 1939. These seem to be non-figurative compositions, often large in format, in which both organic and geometric shapes appear. They are executed in pastos application, with a mixture of sand on the surface, giving a bold, coarse texture. These pictures are seldom purely abstract. In many of them one senses an underlying observable reality - a view from an aeroplane, shadows on a wall surface, a female body or cloud formations. The resemblance to shapes which occur in architectural plans is, too, sometimes striking.A hint of what these paintings meant to Aalto is given by his explicit reluctance t exhibit them as detached works of art. For him they were insolubly tied to his building exercises and experiments undertaken wit the purpose of facilitating his work as a architect. One of the primary problems h set himself as an architect was how to combine well-balanced and expressive entities out of independent building elements. Other architects working from a dominant system of forms, from an all-embracing module, a mathematical structure or a general Gestalt, can attach the elements of a building to one another more or less rationally and weigh up their proportions. Aalto worked with detached, individual forms, which he balanced against one another intuitively. As with Cezanne, the whole emerged from his spontaneous sensibility and the r undertaking were unique. Painting was important training for him, because had only to consult his sense of form and harmony, while in building all and technical demands involved had to be taken into account.Aalto was very pleased in 1970 when his paintings were published, with architectural drawings and details of houses he had completed, in the beautiful volume Synopsis, put out by the Technical College of Zurich, but he said categorically 'no' to Louis Carre, the art dealer (for whom he built a villa outside Paris), when the latter proposed that h launch Aalto independently as a painter. The small exhibition of Aalto's paintings w c being arranged during the summer of 19 at the Villa Mairea would have been quit acceptable to him, since the setting is Aalto's own architecture. However, it is still tempting thought to assemble at some time an independent and more comprehensive show of this unique contribution to the sidelines of the visual arts. In fairness, special tie between Aalto's painting and architectural work should never be lost sight of, but he was nonetheless a genuine if quite a born artist.

Works