ART
DARK is the northern night, silent the forest under snow, lonely the lake, hard-won the livelihood. Dark too are the tones of " Finnish art : still, cold and hard, yet with an air of fantasy, an extraordinary blend of the primitive and the sophisticated. A kind of tough remoteness permeates it, suggestive ot an austere and solemn fairy-tale. The exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries is welcome but disappointing, for it hints at those excellences we know Finnish arts and crafts to possess but is too meagre to display them convincingly.
To southern and western eyes the greater part of the country's painting is sombre and gloomy—even those artists who have light- ened their palettes under the influence of Paris have seldom heightened the intensity of their colour. Of the painters here Tapani Raittila is perhaps the most sensitive. It is interesting to see work by Mind Aaltonen, best-known of Finnish sculptors, who is represented by a large—and rather clumsy— cubist monument, as well as some more realistic pieces. Pleasant if unexceptional are the prints in the graphic section, where Parisian idioms are clearly marked.
However, Finland's contribution to contemporary trends lies unquestionably in her crafts and her applied design—in the invention and ingenuity of her cheap, laminated plywood furniture ; in the shaggy, richly-dyed rugs and textiles of her weavers, which reflect so clearly the dark restraint of the national colour-sense; and pre-eminently, of course, thanks to the remarkable policies pursued by the one pottery factory and the four glassworks in the country, in the slender, pinched-in forms of her decorative ceramics and the weighty sensuousness of her glass. Had this exhibition, like one I saw in Gothenburg a year or two 'back, consisted only of the latter, it would have made a greater impact on the London public.
There are one or two chairs and stools (but not enough) by the great Alvar Aalto, but the names which dominate this part of the exhibition are Kyllikki Salmenhaara and Birger Kaipiainen, both of whose slim upright ceramics have a specifically Scandi- navian quality ; Rut Bryk with her lyrical softly-coloured plaques and tiles ; end her husband, Tapio Wirkkala, wood-carver, graphic and exhibition designer (the layout of this exhibition is his). His handling of the brittle, quickly-setting Finnish glass is brilliantly bold and sensitive, and shows, with its intuitive subtleties based on re- current leaf and lily forms, the same sense of texture and material as his carved chunk of laminated aircraft ply. M. H. MIDDLETON
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