Göran Schildt (1917-2009)

Author, biographer, art historian, and master of the Daphne

Göran Schildt (1917–2009)

print this

The author and art historian Göran Schildt died at his home in Tammisaari on March 24th at the age of 92.
      Schildt is probably best known for his travel writing, which won international acclaim, though his major work was a three-volume biography of his friend, the celebrated architect Alvar Aalto, completed after Aalto's death.
      Göran Schildt graduated from high school in 1934 and studied art history in Italy and Spain and literature at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1934-1939. He completed his doctoral thesis on the work of artist Paul Cézanne in 1947.
     
Schildt's lifelong interest in and passion for the cultures of the Mediterranean had their spark in the year he left school, while sailing on a boat from Barcelona to the Balearic Islands, at that time still miraculously untouched by tourism.
      He was gravely wounded in action in the Winter War of 1939-40, and while recuperating over a six-month period he promised himself that if he pulled through he would sail his own boat to the Med immediately after the end of hostilities.
     
He bought the Daphne - the wooden ketch that became famous through many of his books - in 1946, and sailed it through the French river and canal system down to the Mediterranean.
      The trip spawned one travel book, and the later voyages of the Daphne produced seven more, which were translated into several languages from the original Swedish in which he wrote.
      They sold briskly in Europe and also in the United States, perhaps in part because they provided a post-war reminder of the long historical roots of that European civilisation that had so recently seemed threatened with extinction.
     
The commercial success allowed Schildt a comfortable measure of independence and gave him the chance to concentrate purely on writing.
      His oeuvres included a number of novels and autobiographical works, around thirty in all, alongside essay collections and works on the theory of art.
      He was also a long-serving cultural columnist with the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet, writing for the paper for nearly half a century.
     
As noted, one of the cornerstones of Schildt's career was his biography of Alvar Aalto.
      Schildt and Aalto had met at a film club that Aalto was chairing.
      The two men became firm friends, and in a sense Aalto (1898-1976) served as a father-figure for Schildt, who had lost his own father - the playwright and short story writer Runar Schildt - at the age of eight.
      Aalto gifted the drawings for the Schildts' home in Tammisaari at the end of the 1960s, in order that the writer and his wife Christine "would spend more time here in Finland".
      It was a brave effort by Aalto, but it didn't really come off: Christine and Göran Schildt only spent a part of their years in Tammisaari, as their second home and the home-port of the Daphne was on the Greek island of Leros from the mid-1960s onwards.
     
Another important figurative father-figure for Schildt was the French author André Gide (1869-1951).
      Schildt translated Gide's books into Swedish, and the writer and the young scholar became friends after Schildt had written a dissertation on Gide's work.
     
In 1987, the Schildts established the Christine and Göran Schildt Foundation, which has sought to strengthen cultural contacts between the Mediterranean region and Finland, through the medium of exhibitions, publications, and lectures. The foundation also supports research into the work of Alvar Aalto.
      The Daphne was in Schildt's ownership until 1984, when he sold her on to a German couple who continued to live and sail in the motor-sailer for over a decade.
      In 1997, plans were set in motion to get her back to Finland. She suffered serious damage in a Caribbean hurricane, and even the ignominy of being crushed by a dropped cargo container in Florida during her return, but the vessel has since been lovingly restored to her former glory and is now on display in the Forum Marinum Museum in Turku.


Links:
  Villa Schildt - The Christine and Göran Schildt Foundation
  Göran Schildt writing on why the Foundation was set up
  Forum Marinum, Turku: The ketch Daphne

Helsingin Sanomat