Förstadsvy (Suburban view) 

Förstadsvy (Suburban view) is a significant work from the artist’s turbulent 1940s, a decade which, for Finland, was more or less characterised by armed conflicts in the shadow of the Second World War.

On 30 November 1939, Soviet forces invaded Finland with a staggering 21 divisions (totalling 450,000 troops). That same day they also bombed Tove Jansson’s hometown, Helsinki, destroying more than 50 buildings and killing about 100 citizens. The ensuing 105-day-long Winter War ended, after the Finnish troops had miraculously and heroically held their ground against the invading forces, on 13 March 1940.

Seeking revenge on the Soviets and wanting to reclaim previously lost terrain (the 1940 Moscow Peace Treaty had forced Finland into ceding 10% of its territory), Finland declared war on the Soviet Union on 25 June 1941, thus initiating the Continuation War, which would end in bitter defeat for Finland with the Moscow Armistice on 19 September 1944.

These two horrible armed conflicts (which would be followed by the Lapland War, against Nazi German forces in Finland, between September and November 1944) had a profound and depressing effect on everyday life in Finland. Tuula Karjalainen (born 1942, Finnish art historian, curator and author who served as director of the contemporary art museum Kiasma in Helsinki 2001-2006) writes (in Tove Jansson. Arbeta och älska, 2013):

The war existed not only at the front but everywhere; its sounds were the clink of broken glass, the thunder of bombs, and gun salutes at heroes’ graves. It dictated life, housing, diet, health, and relationships. The war brought death, loss and great sorrow. The feelings of war have been described as extreme. There was plenty of deep and irreconcilable hatred. It was permitted, and hatred was often even considered desirable and patriotic. Bitterness grew as the war dragged on and took many different forms. Love and eroticism also found fertile ground during the war. It was said that people danced over graves with a hysterical energy that came from a combination of fear of death and a will to live. People wanted to forget and tried to drown their sorrows in alcohol. They remained silent when sober, and only when drunk did their fears come to the surface, but they never managed to escape them. The struggle for survival continued in various ways all the time, every day. The difficulties of life paralysed, consumed and depleted the people.

Tove Jansson was no exception. Back home in Helsinki, life went on as usual, albeit in the shadow of war. What had once seemed important tended to fade into the background, and life increasingly revolved around survival, her own as well as that of her loved ones. For Jansson, the latter primarily involved her older brother, Per Olov (1920-2019), and her then boyfriend, Tapio Tapiovaara (1908-1982, Finnish artist), both of whom had gone to war.

While waiting for worrying reports from the front, a lot of Jansson’s thoughts at this time were taken up by constant concern about food supplies. In summer and autumn, the Janssons gathered everything they could for the winter. The whole family picked berries, mushrooms, various herbs and leaves; the vegetable garden provided vegetables and fruit, and they bought flour and preserved fish. The Jansson family’s housekeeper picked clover and raspberry leaves. In one of her many letters, Jansson wrote, ‘We have become veritable grass eaters – if you get a piece of meat once in a while, you feel strange and wild like Tarzan afterwards.’

As a counterbalance, however, to the worries and gloom, there were parties where, as mentioned, people often behaved as if the end were near. Despite the war, people wanted to live and dance, something that Jansson loved. Tuula Karjalainen writes (quoting Jansson’s notebook from February 1942 and a letter dated 2.5.1942):

It was as simple as drawing the blackout curtains, turning on the music and dancing – which was forbidden during part of the war, but people danced in secret and drank and talked too much. And all conversations ended with a wish for the war to cease. If you ever managed to be happy, you felt guilty. War weariness often turned into pure revelry, like a May Day celebration at Ben and Essi Renvall's house, where people drank hysterically, danced like mad, argued and laughed. Tove described the partying as desperate, because the anxiety of war and the alcohol caused emotions to run out of control.

The constant anxiety, the struggle for survival and the extreme emotions that accompanied this situation would become a direct threat to Jansson’s artistic career during these years. Today, we can gain an insight into Jansson’s despair from a number of preserved letters that she wrote to her friend Eva Konikoff (1908-1999). Konikoff (who was a Jewish woman of Russian descent who had fled to Finland from St. Petersburg) found the atmosphere between the Winter War and the Continuation War very disturbing (where her Russian origins were disliked by the Finns and her Jewish heritage made her feel as if under constant threat from Finland’s Nazi German allies) and chose to continue her escape to the United States. Their contact was then maintained primarily through correspondence (Jansson wrote around a hundred letters to Konikoff over the course of thirty years). Tuula Karjalainen writes:

The young people wrote to each other about their dreams and fears and pondered life, work and love – in other words, all the issues that are normally central to young women. […] The letters describe everyday life, the constant worry about food and, above all, the survival of Tove’s boyfriend, brother and friends in battle. […] The letters describe a young woman’s coming of age and the desires, disappointments and aspirations of a budding artist. […] Above all, Tove wondered what was most important in life and art. Love and the choice of a life partner occupied her thoughts at times, as they do for any young person. Happiness and despair, elation and depression alternated. Because of the war, Tove lived on this emotional roller coaster.

The feelings evoked by the war reflected a deep sense of hopelessness and a recurring desire to leave everything behind. Depression often took hold of Jansson’s mind and threatened to put an end to all creative impulses. Not even her own beloved painting seemed to offer any comfort. In a letter to Konikoff, Jansson writes, ‘Eva, the most important things have become unnecessary! They have created a completely different world; no, we have allowed it to become a different world where we no longer belong. Of course it has been difficult to paint, but now it doesn’t even make sense, and it’s all because of the war.’

A few months after Jansson, despite her mixed emotions about art, completed Förstadsvy (Suburban view), she wrote to Konikoff again: ‘War everywhere, the whole world at war […] Sometimes I feel as if all the anxiety in the world is weighing down on me like a lump, threatening to burst. Never before has compassion been so mixed with bitterness, love with hate, the will to live – and despite everything, to live truly and with dignity – with the desire to just crawl away and let go.’

Despite all the misery, Jansson did, however, persevere with her painting. Perhaps art was, after all, a way of shutting out all the negative thoughts. Nor was life always bleak. There were glimmers of light from time to time. In late spring/early summer 1941, for example, Jansson exhibited her work in Åland, where she spent some time in ‘a remote part of the island, spending her days strolling around the birch groves and along the beaches, rowing around the coast, sunbathing naked, making fires and cooking food, painting, swimming [...] and living a paradise-like existence.’ (Letter to Konikoff, 10.6.1941)

She also spent part of that summer with family members in the Pellinki group of islands in the archipelago off Porvoo, where everyday chores (such as repainting the sailboat, fishing for provisions, diving for seaweed and picking blueberries) ‘seemingly made the summer like all the previous ones, although the great shadow of war was always in the background’. (Letter to Konikoff, 4.8.1941).

Jansson had barely finished writing the letter, quoted above, before she reached for her brushes and palette. Towards the end of September, she wrote (25.9.1941) the following to Konikoff about that year’s Autumn Exhibition at the Helsinki Art Hall:

I submitted seven canvases, one of which, a small floral still life, was rejected. The portrait of Ada carries the collection […] Then I have a large floral bouquet motif in bold colours, which is new in that the vase stands on the floor and I have included the interior in the composition so that the flowers do not appear so pretentious. A small sketch from the ridges outside Pellinge and the canvas Carin and I painted at Nattis. It is quite dull and softly grey-green, an immovable, sparse forest where three pale Fanny figures move around picking berries at dusk. Furthermore, a natura morte and a summer night with moon and creatures that were driving me crazy because half the picture insisted on being in daylight. It is terribly difficult to paint golden yellow cornfields at night! A railway crossing behind the fields with the melancholic attributes of the suburbs: gasometers, factory chimneys, closed freight cars, lonely houses. The girl on the road glows white. -The week before the deadline was, as usual, slightly hysterical; the canvases took turns on the easel, and I was convinced that no one except Ada would be completed in time. […] It is so deeply satisfying that the paintings have been submitted; now the critics can chew them over as much as they like!

Förstadsvy (Suburban view) is illustrated on page 248 in Erik Kruskopf’s book Bildkonstnären Tove Jansson from 1992. On the following pages, Kruskopf writes:

In the numerous suburban images she created on her wanderings outside the city limits during the war years, she was able to freely combine elements from different places in the same image: a road with a viaduct was furnished with figures observed elsewhere; some houses in the background make you think you can identify the place, but the garden plot on the left may be a memory from the allotment gardens of the people of Lallukka, while a meadow with haystacks is a summer impression from a trip to Åland.

This may very well be true, but when you compare certain elements of the composition (railway viaducts, gasometers and factory chimneys) with Tallbacken (Helsingfors) (1942, oil on canvas, 46 x 60 cm, Firestorm Foundation), it lies very close at hand to think that (artistic licence or not) the depicted scene is mostly based on the area of Tallbacken, or Mäntymäki in Finnish, (close to where Jansson lived with her family, in Lallukka, before moving to her own apartment in 1942) in the Tölö area of Helsinki. Back in the 1940s this was pretty much to be described as the outskirts of the capital and could very well be regarded as suburban. Another indicator of the location is the sign advertising Royal, a popular social hotspot in Helsinki during that time.

In connection with the opening of the 1941 Autumn Exhibition at the Helsinki Art Hall, Jansson pens yet another letter (26-27.9.1941) to Eva Konikoff describing all sorts of things happening in Jansson’s life. Worth mentioning, obviously, is the purchase of an exclusive (and expensive) blue fox fur stole: ‘I need to earn some more money. I have just foolishly depleted my “fortune”, fulfilling my old desire in a moment of weakness, the blue fox fur stole.[…]2.325 mk.’ Of greater importance, however, was ‘Today’s big event’: having come upon potatoes! ‘They are being harvested in full swing now, thank God. I was with Ham [Jansson’s mother] at the opening, wearing stole and curls, smiling and talking like a machine with lots and lots of unimportant people. That was it. People liked my pictures, and they were nicely placed.’

Food was temporarily secured and the beautiful new stole was worn to the opening, where Jansson’s paintings were appreciated. Life could thus go on, despite war and misery.

Signed and dated (lower right corner): ‘Tove -41’.

Provenance

Bukowskis, Stockholm, Contemporary and Design, 6 November 2001, lot 105 (under the title Måne över Sörnäs / Moon over Sörnäs).

Åmells konsthandel, Stockholm.

Private collection.

Bukowskis, Stockholm, sale 664, Modern Art & Design, 21 May 2025, lot 674.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired at the above sale).

Exhibitions

Helsingfors konsthall/Helsingin taidehalli (Helsinki Art Hall), Helsinki, Höstutställningen (The Autumn Exhibition), 1941.

Literature

Erik Kruskopf, Bildkonstnären Tove Jansson, 1992, illustrated p. 248.

(Eds.) Boel Westin & Helen Svensson, Brev från Tove Jansson, 2014, the painting extensively described by Tove Jansson in a letter (dated ‘H:fors 24/9 -41’) to Eva Konikoff, p. 133.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation