Tapio Wirkkala
– Eye, Hand and Thought
Edited by Marianne Aav
Helsinki: Taideteollisuusmuseo and WSOY, 2000. 407p., ill.
ISBN 951-0-25355-3. FIM 515 (US$ 79), hardback
Finnish-language edition:
ISBN 951-0-24806-1. FIM 415 (US$ 63), hardback

In January 1952 the influential American magazine House Beautiful selected as its 'Most beautiful object of 1951' an object by a little-known designer from an oddly obscure little country. For the readers of House Beautiful, which was actively pursuing an agenda of its own – the definition of a style of living suitable for the country which had emerged from the Second World War as the richest nation on earth – only the best was good enough. An inspection of the objects on show at the Milan Triennale of the previous summer had pinpointed the Finnish designer Tapio Wirkkala's laminated wood platter as the 'best of the best' of international contemporary design. House Beautiful enthused: 'You may call it a tray, or a piece of sculpture.... It reminds you of a leaf, though it was not copied from a leaf. But as with all natural things, you feel it was not labored or contrived. It seems to have grown that way.'
     For Wirkkala, the accolade underlined his international breakthrough at the Milan exhibition, where he had won three Grand Prix. For his obscure nation, Finland, which had won more Grand Prix than any other country at the same show, it marked the first trans-Atlantic success of the brilliantly opportunistic campaign by Finnish design's 'demon promoter', H. O. Gummerus, to hammer home some essential political and economic messages. Finland was not a Soviet satellite. Finland was a civilised country. Finland was an artistic country. Finland was a Scandinavian country. And Finland had a market economy. Finland was open for business with the West.
     Of the greatest names of this golden age of Finnish design – Wirkkala, Kaj Franck, Timo Sarpaneva – Tapio Veli Ilmari Wirkkala (1915–1985) was perhaps the most central, and certainly the most charismatic. Trained as a sculptor, he worked as a designer in almost every conceivable medium – glass, porcelain, wood, silver, steel, plastic, graphics – as well as playing an important role in interpreting and promoting Finnish design as a whole in his role as an exhibition designer. And behind the work stood the mythic figure of the designer himself, the mystical maker, wanderer of the Lapp wildernesses, who was more than happy to lend his persona to the promotion of his work. To non-Finnish audiences, he came across as a Hemingwayesque character, an uomo naturale, a role he played up to the hilt, happily munching on a tulip at one of the legendary dinners given by the editor of the Italian interior design magazine Domus, or regaling members of the foreign press with tales of how he wrestled with bears every morning at his log cabin in Lapland.
     Published to accompany an exhibition of the same name which ran at the Helsinki Museum of Art and Design last winter, Tapio Wirkkala – Eye, Hand and Thought contains a series of essays by design history professionals – among them Jennifer Opie of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Venetian glass historian Rosa Barovier Mentasti and Kaisa Koivisto of the Finnish Glass Museum in Riihimäki – interspersed with contributions from contemporaries who knew the designer. There are useful accounts of his work with glass (both studio and factory-produced), porcelain, precious metals and plastic; and an essay by Timo Valjakka, director of the Kunsthalle Helsinki, underlines Wirkkala's epic conception of his role as designer by tracing the sculptural nature of his work from the enormous laminated birch relief Ultima Thule – the name given by ancient geographers to the northernmost land in the inhabited world – which decorated the Finnish section of the Montreal world's fair in 1967 to his unrealised design for a landscape monument to the deeply compromised national hero and ex-president Urho Kaleva Kekkonen.
     Inevitably, however, it is the work, beautifully photographed, which steals the show. With its swirling, sculptural form, both following the grain of the wood and suggesting other natural forms, such as a ridge and fell landscape or a stream at snow-melt, Ultima Thule is emblematic both of Wirkkala's work and of the great post-war re-imagining of Finland of which it formed a part. All the other great works of the Wirkkala, and therefore the high modernist, canon, are also present, from the Kantarelli (Chanterelle) vase (1946) and the Paadarin jää (Paadar's Ice) cast glass sculpture (1960) through to the glass incarnation of Ultima Thule (to 1985) and what was probably his most widely known and, perversely, probably most overtly ambassadorial design, the Finlandia vodka bottle (1970). (There is a sense in which this can be regarded as a kind of apotheosis to Gummerus's programme for Finnish design: for a period during the Cold War, Finlandia vodka enjoyed enhanced sales in America because of the simple fact that it was not Russian. The bottle was discontinued last year.)
     For all those who regret modernism's tendency to deny its origins, however, it will be the more rarely seen objects that are the most rewarding. The exhibition included many of the large laminated wood sculptures from which Ultima Thule derived, providing an eloquent reminder of the craft nature of some of Wirkkala's work. Even many of the serially produced items in the technologically backward conditions of post-war Finland, among them the original Finlandia bottle, included elements of hand-working, and it is good to be reminded that even Wirkkala's most elegantly modernist designs were made not on streamlined factory production lines but by craftsmen in traditional workshops. The work shown ranges from the one-off sculptural pieces to Wirkkala's patient formal, and equally sculptural, studies for, for example, cutlery handles and pipes. Much of Wirkkala's work, in fact, lay outside high design, and the book includes his designs for a ketchup bottle that doesn't clog, a travelling toothbrush with toothpaste in the handle, and a floating, duck-shaped bottle for liquid soap designed to appeal to children.
     Most revealing of all, however, are the early, decorative pieces: the patterned laminated birch trays of the early 1950s, the furniture made from 'rhythmic' plywood – pale wood with a distinctive dark, wavy stripe and, most of all, the figurative etched and cut glass – all of which belong to a class of work that is usually suppressed in histories of modernist design, not least by the designers themselves. Perhaps the most spectacular example, the cast glass Madonna, with a Chagall-like, floating figure representing the Virgin, was designed just a year before Wirkkala's signal success at the Milan triennale; another, the intricately engraved Campanile of 1951, was actually exhibited there. Much, much later, Wirkkala's porcelain vase Paperbag (1977) showed the heterodox nature that had always been part of his modernity. Taking the form of a crumpled paper bag, its apparently droll post-modernity (the reason, presumably, for its continued status as one of the Rosenthal porcelain company's best-sellers) merely underlined the qualities that had characterised his design all along – simple forms, and a sometimes almost synaesthetic imitation of one simple material by another (paper by porcelain, ice by glass, water by wood).
     If a community is too big for all its members to be known to one another personally, the nature of what binds it together, as Benedict Anderson, author of that classic study of the nature of nationalism, Imagined Communities, has argued must be an imagined link. After the second global conflict of the 20th century, the world was self-evidently developing into such a community – place where, for better or worse, everything affected everything else. Finland, then, was far from being alone in its need to reconstruct itself – materially, commercially, psychologically and imaginatively – after the war. All participants were faced by the same need to find a place in a world order that had utterly changed. Wirkkala's work is surely best seen not in the familiar terms of a somehow opportunistic recasting of the national image of Finland, but as a prodigious and protean work of the imagination. It can be no surprise that the work of Wirkkala and his designer colleagues gained its acceptance first abroad, and only then in Finland; for the project that lent it its wider meaning was nothing less than the reconfiguration of the imagined community of this small country and its place in a newly re-imagined world.


     A version of this review appeared in
     things magazine, winter 2000–2001.
 
 
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