Important Sale Week
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Lots to be sold at Uppsala Auktionskammare’s Important Sale Week 10 – 13 December 2024
The Swedish novelist and playwriter Adolf Paul (1863-1943) moved to Finland with his parents in 1872. Later on a significant meeting with the great Finnish realist painter Albert Edelfelt at a train station, where the painter told Paul about the great adventurous life of an artist, inspired him to pursue the will of his heart towards an artistic career. Paul did not follow the wish of his father to take over the work at the family farm, and he started to study music at the Helsinki Music Institute, where he befriended Jean Sibelius (1865-1957). Eventually he moved to Berlin and joined the Scandinavian artist community, where he met Edvard Munch, August Strindberg and Albert Engström among others. The Nordic artists were appreciated in Germany and the group of friends often gathered at Zum schwarzen Ferkel. Adolf Paul had a central role in this bohemian circle and he can be seen in Munch’s famous painting “The Vampire”, as the man the red-haired woman is bending her head over. He sometimes visited Finland, and in 1893 he befriended painter Axel Gallén (at the time he still had not changed his name). His good new friend created the cover for one of his novels, Ein gefallener profet in 1895, and Paul happily frequented the group of friends called “The Symposium Circle” when in Helsinki and they corresponded frequently.
The Symposium Circle with composers and artists of Young Finland formed in the winter 1892 when Jean Sibelius moved to Helsinki. Sibelius, Robert Kajanus (1856-1933) and Gallén, sometimes Armas Järnefelt, Adolf Paul and Mikko Slöör among others, were included in the group. The friends often met in the evenings at the restaurant Kämp, having discussions of art, philosophy, different theories, in true inspirational intellectual gymnastics. Under influence of liqueur, wine and cigars, they exchanged thoughts and ideas.
Akseli Gallen-Kallela began working on his “Kämp-paintings”, a sort of group portraits of the Symposium Circle, late in 1893, before he moved to Sääksmäki, Rapola, where the work continued. Several works and studies from this period can be linked to the “Kämp-paintings”, including the artist’s self-portrait “Quand Même!” and the two significant watercolours included in the sale. There are two separate oil paintings known as the result of this; “Symposium” (often called “Kajus-taflan” by the artist himself, or ”Problem”), in Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation, Mänttä, and “Symposion” (also called “Problem”), in a private collection. The painter appears to have worked on his compositions possibly parallel but seemingly (according to correspondence) in a sequence where “Symposion” is the final work. Gallen-Kallela often developed his compositions, which is proven by his sketches and/or studies helping him to reach his final result. This can be seen also in other important composition by the artist. The two watercolours included in this sale are closer to “Kajus-taflan” and should perhaps be seen as early studies for the composition.
In the painting ”Problem (Symposium)” (Kajus-taflan) in Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation, Akseli Gallen-Kallela and his friends; the composer Oskar Merikanto (1868-1924), conductor and composer Robert Kajanus and composer Jean Sibelius are gathered around a table. In the background a forest is seen, the night sky and a spirit enlightened by the light from the moon behind. At the left side of the table, a foot is visible. Gallen-Kallela early on cut out a skinned female figure from the original canvas, and the description of the initial composition has until 1996, only been known from letters. The watercolour, lot 787, presented in this sale gives us an idea of the whole initial composition of the Serlachius painting. The watercolour is hence an important addition to the knowledge about not only Gallen-Kallela’s work with the Kämp-series but also on the artist and his working methods. The female figure has been interpreted to represent the materia, or that of the sphinx with its riddles. The distorted face of Merikanto, which Gallen-Kallela explained was a challenge to paint, is almost caricature-like. This is also visible in both watercolours of the sale.
The interpretation of the composition has been discussed, a probable explanation is that it shows Gallen-Kallela’s understanding of the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament 2:12-21. Others argue that it is rather a depiction of a gathering of friends solving the main questions while holy drinking.
In the finale version, “Symposion” (until 1904 called “Problem”), in a private collection, the figure previously depicting Merikanto has now been replaced by a man sleeping on the table. A sleeping man can also be seen in the watercolour, lot 788, in the sale, but with the man on the opposite side of the table. It has been argued that Gallen-Kallela wanted the figure to represent a metaphor of the fallen critic; a man, who could not climb the ladder of the genius, but is tired and falls asleep, when others awake to hear the eternal voices. The group appears less drunk and more dignified. No glasses or bottles fallen on the table, and their faces are more subtle stunned by the vision of the spirit in the left part of the painting, envisioned by Isis’ wings.
In a letter from Gallen-Kallela to Carl Dørnberger dated 15.9.1894, he describes with his own words the painting depicting: “a couple of my friends (the musicians Sibelius and Kajanus) sitting in a tavern in the light of a fire with bottles and glasses. The title of the painting was ‘The Problem’ with myself painted among them. A pair of Isis wings appears before our eyes looking in amazement. Kajanus is sitting and explaining the situation to us. Blood-red clouds are crowding behind my head, spreading out against a deep blue starry sky with a large oppressive planet. A dark fairy-tale forest appears to grow out of Sibelius’s hair. A fourth man, who didn’t have the strength to follow the conversation has passed out on the table. I had faith in my painting, people just deride me and attacked me in public for having displayed such a painting.”
This second, more finished version, was shown for the first time at Finska Konstnärers höstutställning 1894, and again in Berlin in 1895. The painting is accompanied by an elaborate frame designed by the artist himself. This painting was the one intended by the painter to be exhibited and shown. The first came into the collection of Gösta Serlachius in 1927, via Eric O.W. Ehrström.
The life in Berlin for Adolf Paul evolved around his own writing but also him being a central person in the circle of painters and writers living there. The exchange of letters was extensive. His involvement in the development of Gallen-Kallela’s “Kämp-paintings”, can be seen in a letter most likely dating from January 1894:
“Helsinki Dear Brother! I think we have misunderstood the sphinx in your Kajus painting as a symbol of feminine matter. Let it be what it is in the other painting, the wonderful feminine element in our fantasy, to which one gives oneself up with of one’s sexual force in all artistic production. In the other painting it gives thus the fully surrendered elevation to its fantasy life only as a consequence of the inner superior vigour of manhood’s ability to be intoxicated – and in the Kajus painting internal productivity develops under the intoxication of alcohol. The sphinx, the mother of our spiritual children, comes then for a moment, flying like a strange bird in the miraculous, oversaturated brilliancy of colour – sitting for a moment at our table, ready to fly away again at the very next moment. And it tells and lies, partly as a joke, the most splendid tales, interprets the most wonderful riddles, conjures forth the most adventurous pictures of the future for us, that is the hermaphroditic soul in the whole pastime, only an enchantment of mind that comes and flies away – with alcohol. But never the mother that gives birth to any other children of my fantasy than the fleeting ones. Fog, matter, the fat of the soul, the man of flesh in us that alcohol has been able to arouse, sinks again with alcohol and closes itself to the endless expanses through which the wonderful bird came flying to us and through which it flew away. Am I right? Was it not that sphinx riddle you wanted to pin down in the painting. To bed now, you devil, so you will get a couple of delightful fantasies from me to entertain yourself. In exchange for what I got from you.”
It is known that Paul showed some watercolours by Gallen-Kallela to his friends Edvard Munch and Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewsky in Berlin in May 1894, making big impressions on them. For instance it was around this time Munch started working on his “Kvinna i tre stadier”/”Sphinx” (Rasmus Meyer collection, Bergen). The two watercolours presented in this sale have been in the collection of Adolf Paul and then been passed on within the family. It was only in 1996 that they were rediscovered and in 1998 for the first time exhibited at Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde in Stockholm.
As one of Gallen-Kallela’s most important, and interesting compositions, ”Problem”, is a key artwork within Finnish art history. The studies in this sale, with their provenance, links the Finnish artist Gallen-Kallela with the Scandinavian community in Berlin at a short period in the 1890s when some of the Nordic countries most pivotal painters created masterpieces, forever admired, marking their importance in the further research and understanding of one of Finland’s foremost painters – Akseli Gallen-Kallela. ■