Tutta Palin

Strategies of Differentiation: Two Generations of Early 20th-Century Finnish
Women Artists in the Light of Their Press Photographs
Tutta Palin
This paper presents one facet of a larger ongoing project in which I explore the authorial
strategies and conditions of survival of some reasonably successful women artists active in
Finland from the 1920s through to the 1950s, during a time when the local artworld and media
environment were undergoing a somewhat staggering process of modernisation. With artists I
am here mainly referring to painters, sculptors and graphic artists, and my perspective links
me to feminist authorship studies and modernist studies.
Finland’s independence in the year 1917 had been followed by a short but fierce internal war
between the so-called reds and whites, and partly due to these circumstances the official art
institutions where, for quite a while, in the hands of particularly conservative male agents
whose nationalistic agenda hardly implicated women at all. There were, however, other
possibilities of career enhancement, such as the only just emerging commercial art market and
private foundations and, in the first place I would say, the quickly expanding field of daily and
weekly press, together with some yearbooks and other more specialised art periodicals. It is
almost as if women were forced into more flexible and “modern” professional strategies and
forms of self promotion.
Of particular interest are the press photographs of two artists, one of them Ester Helenius
(1875–1955), a painter of an older generation, and the other a sculptor of a younger generation
called Essi Renvall (1911–1979), who both embraced the possibilities of the new forms of
journalism centred around exceptional individuals and their life styles and visual appearances.
According to the evidence of some private letters, Helenius at least actively sought the
attention of the press. What I find particularly interesting is that at this point, this kind of
conflation of popular attention, visuality and femaleness did not compromise the professional
credibility of the women in the same way as it did in the latter part of the century. This
happened to Essi Renvall herself when she gained prominent patrons in President Kekkonen’s
Finland and appeared increasingly in the women’s magazines. As she launched her career in
the middle of the 1930s she was, however, very warmly welcomed by art critics, both male
and female. Their instant appreciativeness is surprising in comparison with the way Helenius
only made a breakthrough in her fifties in the late 1920s.
I am speaking of press or publicity photos instead of photojournalism since it seems that many
of the portraits were privately commissioned studio photographs circulated by the artists
themselves, or by their carefully chosen employees. In the 1920s and 1930s studio portraits, of
women in particular, were, in fact, frequently used in the illustrated press. The very same
images recur on different fora, and a few of them are visibly signed by well-known
portraitists. On the other hand, there are, towards the 1950s, some examples of fairly
ambitious journalistic reportage. It is precisely the heterogeneity of the production and usage
of the images that makes this phenomenon fascinating. The unstable journalistic practices
regarding portraiture, between the rigid xylographic formulas of the 19 th century and the
sumptuous colour illustrations of the late 20 th century, allowed the sitters an unusually
decisive role in choosing and controlling their public representations. Which does not, of
course, mean that they would have had a total control of their media images; no single agent
had that kind of control. This makes it anyhow possible for me to decipher two different
strategies of the self, corresponding to two different generations of women artists.

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Ester Helenius mainly used, in the journalistic context, very classical static portraits with
neutral backgrounds and no conventional professional attributes, such as those by Ivar
Helander (1895–1959), reserving more elaborate pictures taken in her own studio for her
personal acquaintances and patrons. For her, quality came before quantity. In the published
images, the selection of poses is scarce, the dress most often black. Many of the images have a
Benjaminian ‘auratic’ presence, reminiscent of early photography. There is often pathos
involved, and never humour. Photographs of her appeared mainly in the newspapers and in
more specialised art books, less in the illustrated press.
Essi Renvall, on the other hand, was much more agile and versatile in her self promotion. She
did not seem to regulate her media image as rigorously as Helenius. In the late 1930s and
1940s, portrait-like representations of Renvall, often at work in her elegant work attire,
abound in both the daily and the illustrated press as well as yearbooks of fine art. The style of
the images range from camera club type of “artistic” expression to especially made
photoreportage, such as “Work and Smile” by the photographer and editor Börje Sandberg in
the Kuva (Picture) magazine (5/1950), a magazine launched in 1937 following the concept of
the British Picture Post. Interestingly enough, one of the images shows the artist’s signature
as chiselled on a painted area of the glass door of her studio. The act of signing, and of
positing the professional ‘logo’ against her bosom, documents a cheerful sense of humour on
the part of the artist, lending at least part of the authorship to herself as the object of the gaze.
Yet it is clear that the reportage is a collaboration involving voluntary posing/staging from the
part of the sitter. The title “Work and Smile” in itself comments on her willingness to cooperate.
At the beginning of her career Renvall, indeed, worked herself for some years for an
advertising agency to support her growing family.
In their method of mediation and dispersal and in their mode of address, i.e. in the energy and
active mobility of her figure, Renvall’s strategies of the self can be read as more modern than
those of Helenius. But when it comes to iconography, including the femininity of her female
type, she hardly corresponds to the ideal of the new woman. Even though we see her working,
she is willing to play with her professional integrity. In some specific contexts, she even
agrees to leave the artist’s robe aside altogether and appear as a mother; an illustrative
example can be found in the newspaper of a large co-operative organization (“Essi Renvall: a
young talented sculptor”, Elanto 9.4.1943). Helenius on her part was a so-called independent,
self-supporting woman (Finn. itsellinen nainen), a femme seule, who in her interviews always
speaks as an artist whereas Renvall’s status as an artist’s spouse, before their divorce in 1944,
was often underlined by the press. Since there are also illustrations of her sculptural work in
the Elanto article, written by a woman, I read it as an articulation of the acutely modern
problem of combining motherhood and professional life.
I want to stress the fact that both of the strategies described were expressions of agency and
professionalism, albeit in different ways. The point of this paper has been to shift the authorial
status, or function, from the photographer and the photographic discourse to the sitters, in
order not to see them as passive objects of a camera or a gaze, nor as just another locus in a
network of meanings. It is, however, not an omnipotent authorship that I am delineating. The
sitters represent just one instance of the usage of the images, and even in their case I can only
detect the effects of their choices, not their intentions. What I am, anyhow, trying to do is to
treat them as historical agents, i.e. actual people who do things and who somehow matter or
have an effect on the surrounding world.

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References:
Lindgren, Liisa, Kuvanveistäjän ateljee: studio, verstas ja maitopuoti. In: Taiteilija kuvassa.
Suomalaisia kuvataiteilijoita valokuvissa 1864–2004, eds Erkki Anttonen, Elina Heikka, Otso
Kantokorpi and Liisa Lindgren. Helsinki: Taide / Kuvataiteen keskusarkisto 2004, pp. 132–
179.
Nieminen, Raija, Essi Renvall. Nuori, lahjakas kuvanveistäjä, Elanto 28:7–8 (9.4.1943), pp.
8–9.
Palin, Tutta, Näkymättömät naiset 1904–36 eli mitä dukaattipalkinnot kertovat taiteilijanaisten
arvostuksesta. In: Dukaatti. Suomen Taideyhdistys 1846–2006, ed. by Rakel Kallio. Helsinki:
WSOY 2006. Pp. 128–139.
Renvall, Essi, Nyrkit savessa. Helsinki: Weilin+Göös 1971.
Työtä ja hymyä, Kuva 5/1950, p. 24.