Each generation has its own Aalto image
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By Hannu Pöppönen
The retro style has been seen as a useful way to encourage young people to breathe in influences of Alvar Aalto and his work.
Aalto’s familiar profile can be seen in both the posters advertising the exhibition outside the Design Museum building, and on the front of the T-shirts sold in the museum’s gift shop - much in the same way as the faces of former President Urho Kekkonen, or Che Guevara were pop icons some years ago.
The advertising agency responsible for the marketing has given Alvar Aalto an alter ego of sorts, and a new name - Mr. Funk - a reference to the style of functionalism.
In a book of essays published in connection with the exhibition, the Design Museum’s curator, Jukka Savolainen, writes that young Finnish designers such as Harri Koskinen have said that in other countries their work is often compared with that of Alvar Aalto, and they are often asked about the influence of Aalto on them.
Generations of designers and architects who have come after Aalto have had to examine their work in light of this most famous of Finnish architects. His shadow has been a great one.
However, appreciation of Alvar Aalto has varied. The young generation that grew up after the war rebelled against him, and interior designer Yrjö Kukkapuro, for instance, says that he has consciously avoided using bent wood in his own designs, lest his work be compared with Aalto’s furniture.
Painter and researcher Kimmo Sarje is involved in the part of the exhibition known as Recycling Aalto. The interesting statement on Aalto contains both new and older works.
Sarje first took a stand on Aalto’s work with a series of montages from the late 1980s and early 1990s.
In the series he made ironical comparisons between Aalto’s works - postmodern Savoy vases and his curved chair legs - and cartoon characters and Finnish national myths.
"That was linked with the situation at the time. I decided to take the holiest of holies and give it a punch in the stomach."
With the works for this year’s exhibition Sarje says that he has taken a dive into industrial art.
He has made a large round relief of Aalto vases of different sizes and colour as a conceptual landscape.
In his new works, Sarje’s bitingly ironical vision of the 1980s has taken on a more gentle tone.
"The atmosphere has become freer since the late 1980s. It does not mean that Aalto would be less important, but that the picture is not as monolithic. Both experts, and the population at large are willing to bring out their subjective visions of Alvar Aalto", Sarje says.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 11.6.2004
More on this subject:
 Alvar Aalto exhibition at Design Museum is a major summer cultural event
Helsingin Sanomat
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