Previous Exhibitions in the Rotunda
4.2. - 9.5.2012
The Arctic Puritan – Glimpses into the World of Yrjö Kilpinen’s Lieds
Exhibition design: Conductor Erkki Pullinen.
The composer’s life story and output are presented with manuscripts, printed sheet music, photographs, newspaper clippings, recordings, and other documents
Also displayed is the first collection of sheet music material from a project, supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, whose purpose is print Kilpinen’s unpublished lieds, approximately 350 musical manuscripts from the collection of the National Library of Finland. Editor: Erkki Pullinen, publisher: Sulasol.
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9.9.2011-16.1.2011First Printings and Short Story Illustrations. Juhani Aho 150 years.
The first printings of Juhani Aho’s works from the collection of Heikki A. Reenpää. The short stories’ illustrators include the artists Eero Järnefelt, Pekka Halonen and Venny Soldan, as well as a selection of more recent illustrations by the artist Raimo Sallinen (Valikoima lastuja, WSOY 2011)
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9.6. – 1.9.2011
The Woman in the Red Smock.
Pictures of the life of the artist and tourism promoter Esther Hjelt-Cajanus (1879–1959) in the light of, for example, letters, watercolours, diaries and books.
Exhibition design: Researcher Marjut Hjelt.
Esther Hjelt-Cajanus is one of those Finnish female artists, born in the late 1800s, about whom very little is known. One reason for this neglect would appear to be that the model woman of that time was expected to serve and support her family and husband. If a woman married, her family would come first, and any work as an active artist would remain secondary. This happened to many women, among them Esther Hjelt-Cajanus.
The young Esther Hjelt would have wanted to study the natural sciences or music, but her father Professor Edvard Hjelt hoped that his oldest daughter would become an artist. Because her studies at the Art Association’s drawing school started well, Esther Hjelt’s interest in the visual arts deepened. A study trip to Germany and Italy strengthened her desire to become an artist. Her marriage with the forestry officer Werner Cajanus (1878-1919) however necessitated housework and gainful employment; consequently Esther Hjelt-Cajanus is better known as an illustrator of books and magazines for children.
In the last years of his life, Werner Cajanus served as a diplomat in Sweden and Denmark, during which time Esther Hjelt-Cajanus performed clerical, translating, and representative tasks at Finnish embassies. After the untimely death of her husband, Esther Hjelt-Cajanus returned to Helsinki where she secured a job as a travel agency director in 1923. As a result of Esther Hjelt-Cajanus’s accomplishments in that role, her multifaceted linguistic proficiency, and her extensive knowledge of cultural life, she was invited to Stockholm to found an agency promoting Finnish tourism in 1925. The agency’s range of activities soon became extremely varied, and there was no area of human life where the office and its director, the doctor Hjelt-Cajanus, would not have given help. During the war years, war children in particular received substantial assistance.
Esther Hjelt-Cajanus lived the last 33 years of her life in Stockholm. She still painted to a certain extent, but for the most part she wrote books and articles that dealt with her family and experiences. She donated her father’, husband’s, and her own materials – she had no heirs – to institutions such as the University of Helsinki Library (nowadays the National Library of Finland), the National Board of Antiquities, the National Archives, and Åbo Akademi University. Her wish was to preserved the materials for future generations as a record of what she and her circle of acquaintances had experienced.
The Esther Hjelt-Cajanus material, belonging to the extensive Hjelt family archives in the National Library of Finland’s Manuscript Collections, is sizeable and diversified. Because the pearls of the collection are Esther Hjelt-Cajanus’s watercolors, they have been prominently displayed in the exhibition. The exhibition’s books and magazines are from the Library’s National Collection and Brummeriana. The exhibition materials are supplemented by privately-owned paintings and documents as well as Esther Hjelt-Cajanus’s painting of the Hjelt family from the National Board of Antiquities historical picture collection.
Warm thanks are in order, particularly for Esther Hjelt-Cajanus’s relatives Kaj Laurmaa, Anna and Seppo Perälä, as well as for Päivi Savone for the loan of material and their related information, as well as to the Tuusula residents Matti and Tuomo Kari for the opportunity to photograph the portraits painted by Esther Hjelt-Cajanus when she was 16-years old. Thanks also to everyone else whose donated information has helped assemble a picture of Esther Hjelt-Cajanus’s eventful life, of which this exhibition provides only a narrow glimpse.
15.3.-4.6.
Musicology in Finland. The Finnish Musicological Society 100 years.
Exhibition design: Professor Eero Tarasti, Professor Pirkko Moisala, Coordinator Irma Vierimaa, Researcher Seija Lappalainen, Researcher Jukka Tiilikainen, students Jaani Länsiö, Tuomas Niemelä and Anna-Leena Rysä.
21.10.2010-26.2.2011
Disney Collecting as a Passion
Selections from Pentti Hauhiala’s Disney collection, considered one of Europe’s largest Disney collections, that has been donated to the National Library of Finland. The materials include Disney-themed literature, magazines, other printed products, audiovisual materials, as well as objects.
Heikki Kaukoranta asembled the exhibition materials.
25.3.- 4.10.2010
The Kalevala in many forms
The Old Kalevala’s 175th Anniversary
Exhibition events:
Wed 24 March, at 17, opening in the Cupola Hall: Professor Heikki Laitinen explained the runo singers of the Kalevala and kantele artist Eija Kankaanranta performed Jukka Linkola´s, Harri Wessman´s and Jean Sibelius´ compositions.
Wed 7 April, at 18, Kalevala and kantele concert in the Cupola Hall:
Professor Heikki Laitinen discusses the kantele in the Kalevala. New as well as traditional kantele music will be heard at the concert. Performers: Timo Väänänen, kantele, Anna-Kaisa Liedes, voice, Kristiina Ilmonen, woodwinds.
Wed 14 April, at 17, Lecture: National epic poetry – the Kalevala and the world’s epics. In the Auditorium, Yliopistonkatu 1.
Archive Researcher, Ph.D. Irma-Riitta Järvinen discusses the folklore behind the Kalevala, for example the Aino poems. Archives Director and Docent Lauri Harvilahti discusses the Kalevala within the context of the world’s epic poems.
The exhibition and events have been produced jointly by the National Library of Finland and the Finnish Literature Society.
15.10.2009 - 17.3.2010 (time extended)
The Forgotten Armas Launis (1884-1959)
Composer, author, researcher, teacher - 125 years from his birth
Produced in cooperation with the Association Armas Launis
Associated with the exhibition is an Armas Launis Symposium on16.10., a Concert 1on 6.10 and a film presentation on 15.10.2009.
11.5.−10.10.2009
”Aika könsikkä!”
Aleksis Kivi 175 Years
Produced in cooperation with the Aleksis Kivi Society.
Aleksis Kivi – Finland’s National Author
Aleksis Kivi was born into a tailor's family in the province of Uusimaa in Finland, in a village named Palojoki, which is in the parish of Nurmijärvi, on the 10th of October 1834. His parents were Eerik Stenvall and Anna-Kristiina Hamberg, and they already had three sons. After Aleksis, they had a daughter named Agnes, who died when she was thirteen.
Kivi's great-grandfather had had a soldier's croft in Palojoki since 1766 but, from time to time, the family had also lived in Helsinki. According to Yrjö Blomstedt, his earliest-known ancestors came from Janakkala. His maternal grandfather, Antti Hamberg, was a blacksmith at a place called Nahkela in Tuusula; his paternal grandfather, Antti Juhana Stenvall, was a seaman who had sailed as far as the Mediterranean. Uncle Kalle Kustaa was in the Finnish Guards and helped to put down the Polish uprising. The writer's own father, Eerik Stenvall, had lived in Helsinki as a child and gone to school there. Aleksis's parents could speak Swedish, a skill which the boy acquired himself by moving to Helsinki to go to school; it was a necessity for matriculation and for further study for the priesthood. In fact, Kivi seems to have spoken Swedish distinctly more than Finnish during his lifetime. Between the years 1821 and 1868, only seven boys from Nurmijärvi passed the matriculation examination to become university students. Of these, Aleksis Stenvall was the only commoner; the others were all children of persons of rank. In the year he matriculated, 1857, Kivi made a critical and historic decision from his own point of view and from the point of view of literature: to become a writer in the Finnish language instead of a priest.
Aleksis Kivi, which he used for the first time as a nom de plume in conjunction with the manuscript of Kullervo, in 1860l, was unable to travel abroad for financial reasons, yet he did visit Turku. However, his reading and along with it his horizons, extended far beyond school and university textbooks, to the literature of the whole world. Only a fraction is known to researchers, but Kivi read everything he could lay his hands on, from Held and Corvin's History of the World to works dealing with chemical analysis, newspapers, the poems of Stagnelius and the plays of Shakespeare, which are known to have been an influence on him.
Kivi's most important literary works could be considered as beginning in the mid 1850s, with the play Bröllopsdansen (The Wedding Dance) and ending with the play Margareta, which was published in 1871. The play Nummisuutarit, which came into being as the result of the development of the Finnish language, was awarded the State prize for literature in 1865 and is still today the most frequently performed play ever written in Finnish.
Kivi's most important supporter was Fredrik Cygnaeus, professor of aesthetics and modern literature, who examined Kivi for the matriculation examination and who, from the time of Kivi's very first prize, right up to Kullervo, Nummisuutarit and Seitsemän veljestä (Seven Brothers), which has attained the status of a national novel, repeatedly placed his whole expertise and authority behind Kivi's talent and art. Of his opponents, those narrow-minded captives of literary tradition, the most famous was August Ahlqvist, professor of Finnish language and literature, who achieved an undying reputation by belittling Kivi's works.
Karl Bergbom, the theatre director who made Kivi's plays familiar to the general public, starting with a performance of Lea in 1869, became Kivi's friend and researcher as early as 1864. In his books, the writer named his school and university friend Robert Svanström, who later became a forestry official, as his best friend.
It seems probable that in the development of many of his important poems, and of Kihlaus, Nummmisuutarit, Lea and Seitsemän Veljestä it was in fact an advantage that Kivi had to write them in a completely Swedish-language environment, at Fanjunkars in Siuntio, where he was forced into isolation from his friends through lack of funds. He took this very heavily at times and in his letters he expressed his longing for the company of his friends and his homesickness for the parish of Nurmijärvi.
Besides Cygnaeus, Charlotta Lönnqvist, the mistress of Fanjunkars, could without exaggeration, be described as the writer's most important supporter. From a large group of admirers it is worth mentioning Kivi's beloved Albina Palmqvist, daughter of a Helsinki clothing manufacturer and Aurora Hemmila, a Mäntsälä inn-keeper's daughter. Marriage was impossible, however, since in the society of the civil servant class, Kivi lacked the most essential things of all, an official position and the income that went with it. In his works, Kivi also wrote about his yearning for a family of his own. Socially, Aleksis Kivi fell between two positions in a rather ill-fated way; he was no longer a vulgar peasant but neither did he belong to the gentry. The fount of strength in Kivi's career as a writer was his incredible imagination, his knowledge of people and his literary talent and, at the same time, the love and sympathy towards ordinary people that appears over and over again in his works - incomparable humour as well as a sense of tragedy and comedy.
Aleksis Kivi was a product of three localities - Nurmijärvi, Helsinki and Siuntio - and all of them had their own essential importance to his growth as a person and as a writer. Kivi's mother's home parish of Tuusula provided a final resting place for the author, who suffered in the last years of his life from mental illness. At the time of his death on the night before the last day of 1872, Aleksis Kivi was only 38 years old, but as a writer he is ageless. Seitsemän veljestä and Nummisuutarit are classics of Finnish culture on a par with the Kalevala and the Kanteletar.
Esko Rahikainen
The National Library
Translated by Nicholas Mayow.
Finland and Latvia – cultural interaction over the years
14.11.2008-14.2.2009
Produced in cooperation with the Latvian Academic Library.
The exhibition is associated with events in Finland celebrating the
Republic of Latvia's 90th year of independance.
Brother Giovanni
1.8.-5.11.2008
Hillari Johannes Viherjuuri (1889–1949) − pioneer of Finnish satire magazines, comic books and magazines’ liesure pages.
Exhibition design: Journalist Ville Hänninen.
Seven Steps on the Estonia-Finland Bridge
26.2.-30.6.2008
70 years of official cultural co-operation. 90 years of Finland’s and Estonia’s national independence. In co-operation with the National Library of Estonia and the Tuglas Society.
J. J. Tikkanen – Pioneer of Art History in the Finnish Scientific World
4.12.2007-26.2.2008
7.12.2007 marks the 150th Anniversary of the birth of J. J. Tikkanen, Finland’s first Professor of Art History. Exhibition design: Researcher Johanna Vakkari. In co-operation with the University of Helsinki’s Department of Art History.
A lecture related to the exhibition was held in auditorium:
23.1.2008: Researcher Johanna Vakkari: Taiteilijaksi vai tiedemieheksi: J. J. Tikkasen
vaellusvuodet.
An Ode to Finnish Work
8.9.-24.11.2007
Exhibition design: Tiina Harpf. Visual design: Josetta Ryynänen-Brotherus and Tiina Harpf.
Events held in connection with the exhibition in the Cupola Hall:
11.10.2007: Leivän tähden
1.11.2007: Minä olen näiden kulmien osaava odysseus
14.11.2007: Author Kaari Utrio
