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Kalela

The Cradle of Axel Gallén’s Art

and

Modern Finnish Design

— Janne Gallen-Kallela-Sirén, 2003 —

Kalela’s west façade with Museum Director Aivi Gallen-Kallela.

History and Architecture

Already during his student years in Paris (1884-1889), Axel Gallén harbored the dream of settling down in the Finnish countryside. In letters from Paris to his fiancée Mary Slöör, who was pursuing her own music studies in Helsinki, the young artist writes of his preference for a rural lifestyle: "

Surely you remember how the yeomen have designed their houses. […] Always a large parlor built of pinewood logs in which the walls, even when old, have preserved their warm, yellow coloration. Many windows at all sides and a large fireplace plastered white at the end of the room next to the door. Just imagine how a parlor like that could be decorated into a wonderful room. The windows can be covered how ever one wishes in order to obtain whatever lighting effect one desires. In this way [these rural parlors] are ideally suited for use as ateliers. I do no like at all the conventional ateliers with the skylights and studio styles. […] It is much more difficult to make the metropolitan bourgeois apartments cozy (A. Gallén to Mary Slöör, 1 June 1888).

Kalela, the wilderness abode that Gallén designed as a studio and a home for his art and family, represents the materialization of his youthful architectural dreams. This visionary building, erected according to the artist’s detailed plans in 1894-1895, became the creative cradle of Gallén’s art. Here he conceived the Kalevalian pictures, woodcuts, etchings, stained-glass paintings, and design products that eventually earned him the title of Finland’s national artist.

Kalela is one of the largest nineteenth-century log buildings in Finland whose structure remains intact. Cocooned by pinewoods, it is located on elevated ground at the northwestern tip of a narrow headland that juts into Lake Ruovesi in the Northern Häme district. Kalela’s ground plan measures 18 by 16 meters and its gable rises to the height of 13 meters reaching for the treetops.

It is built of massive dead standing pine logs, an extremely dense construction material that is hard to work but is more durable than fresh timber. Kalela, now 108-years old, is a monument not only to Gallén’s architectural genius, but also to the skill of the thirteen rural carpenters who built it within a year using traditional axes, saws, and improvised tackles.

Kalela’s design and structure owe a considerable debt to traditional Finnish log architecture, loft-barns and the dwellings of Finnish yeomen that Gallén had studied in detail during his earlier rural travels. Kalela culls its architectonic vigor from three primary national sources that are reflected in individual parts of the building: the massive grey-granite foundation and the large granite cellar appended to the building’s east façade reference the stone churches of southern and southwestern Finland as well as the “vogue for natural stone” in late nineteenth-century Finnish architecture in general; the Doric linearity of Kalela’s façades and total absence of exterior wall ornamentation derives from the rigid geometry of rural barns and peasant houses; and finally, the building’s floor plan, large central space, exterior and interior terraces, and steep saddle roof take their cue from the structure of Russian-Karelian farmhouses.

The alpine or Swiss cottage has also been cited as a potential model for Kalela. However, the total absence of studies of such structures among Gallén’s numerous architectural sketches and drawings indicates that formal and structural similarities between Kalela and Norwegian or central European log houses are extraneous and at best explicable in light of a general nineteenth-century vogue for vernacular wood architecture.

The presence of immediate foreign impulses at Kalela is most vividly manifest in details of interior and window design. Sunken bookshelves and walk-in closets, cabinets and hand-made furniture, narrow staircases and windows constructed of small panes, as well as the interplay between colorful doors and window frames, points to English influence. The large north window and skylight also suggest an English source.

Through the design journal The Studio - An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art for which Gallén held a subscription from its second year of publication, 1894, he was able to study the achievements of the English Arts and Crafts Movement, the latest word in fin de siècle modernism. The Studio featured articles and illustrations ranging from modern design and applied arts products to the vernacular architecture of country houses. “

[The] Studio in particular,” Onni Okkonen writes, “with its modernist reviews and reports on artists, Italian renaissance art ideals, decorative and applied art interests, seems to have influenced Gallén from the beginning providing him with significant impulses and also models.”

Gallén’s interest in the Arts and Crafts Movement is also evinced by his attempt to meet its progenitor, William Morris, during his one-month sojourn in London in May-June 1895 (Kalela was under construction at this time). Morris, unfortunately, was not in London at the time of Gallén’s visit. The values of the Arts and Crafts Movement, nevertheless, left an ideological and conceptual imprint on Gallén art and design and he later spoke in warm terms of its ideological forefather John Ruskin (1819-1900).

Like Morris, Gallén saw industrialization as a threat to the arts and believed that the artist-architect must also be a craftsman, that the forms of design must express pristine values. As J. Mordaunt Crook writes in The Dilemma of Style, “The Arts and Crafts Movement involved an attitude, not a style. It was anti-academic, anti-professional, anti-Aesthetic, anti-chic. Its basis was the cult of the vernacular, the art of craft.”

The English-born movement’s ideals, in short, were closely aligned with Gallén’s own oppositional spirit and persistent refusal to submit to the hegemony of any one style; its principles gave him sufficient lebensraum to develop his own ideas and attitudes which were tightly anchored to a naturalist search for constructed truths in the national terrain. For Gallén, moreover, there was no nobler paradigm of nationhood than Britain, as he perceived it, where monarchic tradition was conjoined with democratic values.

The artist’s admiration of things English is evinced in sketches he made in May-June 1895 at the South Kensington Museum, as well as in his letters from London in which he applauds, for example, the doors of English buildings for the “good taste” manifest in their coloration and for the “simplicity and sturdiness” of their workmanship.

On another occasion Gallén writes that everyone in Finland should be sent to study in England. His wife Mary agrees: “This is the most wonderful country we have seen, it is so beautiful here, all the people are good and honest,” she writes to her parents in June 1895.

Kalela from the lake.

Loft-barns at Korpilahti, 1886.

Kalela’s atelier or “Work-smithy” as the artist called it.

Kalela’s library.

Kalela’s dining room.

The ideals of English architecture and design as formulated by the Arts and Crafts Movement were imported to Finland in the 1890s almost single-handedly by Gallén (others would later follow in his footsteps). At Kalela, Gallén’s testing ground for new ideas, countless details bespeak an Arts and Crafts influence: door- and cabinet handles made of curved pine branches; hand-pressed iron hinges; geometrically decorated and carefully color-coded doors; use of traditional Finnish rugs as interior decoration; handmade rustic furniture; and several design and craft items intended for everyday use ranging from a tall movable mirror to an axe-rack sunken into the atelier wall.
The artist’s sketchbook notes on Kalela’s interior design—“Morris for the bedroom … Morris for the toilet”—reveal a clear interest in Morris’ work. In Gallén’s design products that also include textiles, Morris’ specialty, as well as in his graphic works (etchings, woodcuts, posters, bookplates) the Arts and Crafts Movement’s call for honest workmanship and forms, advocacy of indigenous materials and motifs, obtained an indigenous, national identity. Through the work of Gallén’s successors this identity eventually developed into the conceptual base for “Finnish design.”

In the second half of the 1890s, Gallén’s experiments in different media at Kalela earned him a reputation as Finland’s most versatile artist. In 1904, in the first book-length study of his art, Wentzel Hagelstam identifies Gallén as the primus inter pares of modern Finnish design and applied arts:

At first there were some who somewhat mockingly spoke of his seclusion, shrug their shoulders at it as if thinking it was just a ploy to appear original. But these days there is almost no Finnish artist who, having obtained some status, has not constructed his atelier on his own piece of land and according to his own liking. And how plentiful are the impulses for the accurate evaluation of artistic work, how numerous the stimuli for its application, how many the initiatives for its popularization, for its use on behalf of the deep ranks of the people, that have originated from “Kalela,” the artist-hermit’s hut in the midst of the quiet wilderness. Domestic craft arts had been dear to him since his childhood and to them he now sacrificed the long moments of twilight. Possessing a modern library and following the most recent developments in his field of work, he cherished with a burning fascination the blossoming of the applied arts.

He obtained for himself tools and utensils and soon developed into a master in different fields. He sent abundant art treasures from his distant atelier to annual art exhibitions in Helsinki: wooden sculptures; etchings; artistic works made of embossed copper or on zinc plates; stained-glass paintings; plaster reliefs; vibrant bookplates that reveal the individual’s persona. From his hand has originated the first artistic woodcarving (for printing) in Finland, and according to his designs have been made the first textiles in that style which subsequently became the Finnish “art nouveau.” His wife, a talented weaver, has with a manual loom at Kalela realized his idiosyncratic, stylized design fabrics; and they were soon thereafter copied in the workshop of the “Friends of Finnish Handicraft” in Helsinki and were much admired in the Finnish pavilion in Paris [at the 1900 Exposition Universelle]. All these works were Gallén’s most beloved occupation at Ruovesi next to great tasks.

Gallén’s preoccupation with a variety of new media at Kalela undoubtedly retarded the progress of his monumental Kalevala suit, his “great task,” but, as the artist writes in his sketchbook on 6 September 1896, work in different media was also a source of inspiration: I derive little personal benefit from dividing my time between so many different fields of the arts, but in a young fledgling nation such as ours, we need a spirit of enterprise and inspiration. Others will follow in my footsteps, and more committed artists than I will absorb influences and develop each field independently as specialized experts. Besides, I need the stimulation that these exciting experiments have given me. And, in the end, it’s not only for art’s sake that I am doing this. For me art is life, religion - everything.

Death and the Flower, 1896, woodcut.	Mary Gallén, 1896, drypoint.
Ex Libris Axel Gallén, 1904	Emilia Ehrström, 1896, drypoint with aquatint.

The Hand of Christ, detail, 1897, stained glass.

Art, life, religion: in the insistence on their inseparability Gallén again comes close to Morris who proclaimed that “it is not possible to dissociate art from morality, politics and religion.” In Kalela’s “total environment” Gallén was able to unite the energies of these forces and, through fictive projection, transform himself into a heroic renaissance artist, a Finnish Leonardo, who connects the past with the present and, ultimately, with the unborn tomorrow. Let us now take a closer look at Gallén’s self-designed “total environment”.

Three facets of Kalela’s design call for close attention: structure, ornamentation, and the building’s relation to surrounding landscape. In most studies of Finnish architecture Kalela is labeled as Finland’s first “national romantic” building.

This linguistic straightjacket, I propose, misrepresents the aesthetic values that prevailed in Finland in the 1890s by placing too great an emphasis on their presumed romantic descent and by confusing modern nationalist values with the Kantian identification of the aesthetic as a domain of subjective human experience. In Kalela’s structure, for example, there is little justification to speak of romantic models or sources. The building’s structure references tested but not outdated models of log construction, and the appearance of its façades is more indebted to neoclassical principles of design than vague romantic impulses.

Indeed, interesting parallels can be drawn between Kalela and the architectural designs of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Étienne-Louis Boullée: like the latter, Kalela’s exterior contains no ornamentation; the placement and rhythm of Kalela’s windows underline its structural adherence to geometric order; the prominent contour of the saddle roof in the south and west recalls the authoritative linearity of Egyptian pyramids; and the columns on Kalela’s west porch are Gallén’s reinvention of a Doric prototype.

Kalela’s south, west, and north façades contain kinetic energy analogous to that of the pyramids and Gothic cathedrals, but at all points of constructions from the rock foundation to the gable this energy is checked by the “noble simplicity and calm grandeur” (to borrow Winckelmann’s famous phrase) of Gallén’s design.

Even the so-called "Gothic" or "cathedral" window that cuts vertically through the east façade is tightly anchored to its earthy foundation and, thanks to its asymmetrical placement, lacks the thrust of actual cathedral windows. Kalela’s design, somewhat surprisingly, mirrors structural principles that originate from the Greco-Roman world as interpreted and applied by European neoclassical architects. Further analysis may prove that Carl Ludwig Engel’s neoclassic Helsinki—still today one of Europe’s most uniform samples of neoclassic urban design—was as important a source for Gallén’s architectural aesthetics as the rural cottages he encountered on his two-week sojourn in Russian-Karelia in 1890.

Gallén’s own “neoclassicism” as expressed in the design of Kalela is of the primitive, Doric order that celebrates pure volumes and rejects ornamentation. The application of this mode is best evinced in Gallén’s decisive elimination of all surface decoration from Kalela’s façades.

In his early designs for a wilderness studio (1891-1894) Karelian wood ornamentation and curvilinear window dressings have a prominent place, but from the final construction drawings dating from November-December 1894 all extraneous details have been expelled and the covering boards around windows have assumed their present, rectilinear shape.

The narrow exterior galleries and the rose window that are a prominent feature in Kalela's early plans have also been eliminated from the final façade elevations. It is not clear why Gallén opted to eliminate ornament from Kalela’s design, why he rejected more organic Karelian and international prototypes in favor of a Doric vernacular. Based on the dating of his architectural drawings this change of mind seems to have occurred in 1893-1894, the period when Gallén began to read The Studio and in his paintings turned increasingly to Biblical and Egyptianate sources. It seems likely that these points of reference impacted Gallén’s architectural ideas by moderating the impassioned regionalism that had enraptured the artist during his honeymoon to Karelia in the summer of 1890.

In this respect, too, the English Arts and Crafts Movement served as a model, at least conceptually. It heralded, in a sense, a “return to classicism: a return to objective criteria, in this case the authority of function. Buildings were now to speak for themselves, as structures, without the intervention of imagery, of metaphor, or symbol or memory. Architecture as service was to replace architecture as art” (J. Mordaunt Crook, The Dilemma of Style).

This is what Gallén ultimately wanted, a functional studio and home where he could give free reign to his creative energies. Examples of Kalela’s functional design are the eaves that extend far beyond the exterior walls to protect them from rain and snow; the openings in the east and north eaves through which light reaches the windows below; the long projecting gutters, unadorned variants of a Karelian prototype, that thrust rainwater away from the building; and the cathedral window that Gallén introduced into the east façade because he needed a “door” through which large frescoes could be moved in and out of his “workshop.” By cleaning Kalela’s façades of unessential anecdotes and surface ornamentation Gallén was, in effect, following the dictum of one of the most famous English Arts and Crafts architects, C. F. A. Voysey, whose dictum was, “we cannot be too simple.”

Kalela’s south façade.

Kalela’s east façade.

Plan for south wall of Kalela’s atelier, 1894.

Kalela at winter, west façade

In an important 1903 article, “On Finnish Architecture in Our Times,” the Finnish architect and critic Gustaf Strengell confirmed the status of England as the country of origin for the late nineteenth-century yearning for architectural verism, or “rationalism” as he called it. Gallén’s love of simple Doricist architecture is, to be sure, not a product of the 1890s. It is evident already in his 1880s “Barn and shed” –series conceived between 1880 and 1889. His encounter with ornate Karelian architecture in 1890 momentarily skewed this vision, but classicizing impulses from abroad, as well as the Doric simplicity of the houses at Paanajärvi which Gallén sketched in the summer of 1892, caused him to return the architectural roots of his youth—now, however, on a monumental scale.

Gallén’s move towards a new purity of form around the mid-1890s is evinced in three architectural designs, each dated 1894, that take their cue from the formal language of neoclassical architecture. One is a flat-roofed mausoleum with a simple Doric portal; another, a rectangular “Observatory” also in the heavy Doric order; and the third, a design for a “classical-modern” wilderness studio surrounded by a pinewood forest.

These structures recall the geometrically abstract architectural designs of Boullée, Ledoux, and their northern contemporaries Friedrich Gilly and Carl August Ehrensvärd. The significance of these drawings to Gallén is evinced in the fact that he submitted all three to the retrospective display of his drawings and graphic works in Budapest in 1908.

Their importance has been overlooked by scholars of Gallén’s art. Yet, Kalela’s architectural lucidity and structural rationality is indebted exactly to the type of geometric simplification evinced in these forgotten “portraits of imagined buildings”. In fact, Kalela’s most original architectonic feature, the Kalela-column (the term is new), is almost unthinkable without the formal detour into neoclassic architectural terrain evinced in these three drawings. The novelty of the Kalela-column warrants closer analysis.

The columns in Gallén’s early designs for a wilderness studio derive directly from Karelian prototypes, notably the portal of the Miinoa village church which he sketched in August 1890. The Karelian pilasters Gallén documented during his honeymoon are simple wooden posts adorned with carved decorations midway down the shaft. The Kalela-column, in contrast, is a unique, proto-cubist reformulation of the Doric order—it foreshadows the cubist abstractions Constantin Brancusi (1876-1956) created in his Paris studio in the first and second decades of the twentieth century. Most importantly, the Kalela-column represents an unprecedented solution to the dilemma that materials and the disparity of proportions place upon form.

Unlike the Greeks who transformed rugged rocks into round columns, Gallén made rectangular columns out of round tree trunks. The Kalela-column contains all the features of its Doric counterpart: a shaft without base and a capital composed of an abacus and an echinus. In place of the uniform fluting of the Doric column, the Kalela-column features four “flutes”, or chamfers, that stretch downward like pointed arrowheads from the base of the capital. This is a revolutionary structural innovation. It enables the use of columns of different height in the same arcade without violation to their formal harmony and proportional unity. The Kalela-column can be used in infinite variety of sizes by simply adjusting the length and depth of the column’s four chamfers in proportion to its total length and diameter. Even the ancient Greeks would have been hardbound to resolve the dilemma of the proportional unity of form that arises from the use of different sized columns in the same arcade as ingeniously as Gallén tackled it on Kalela’s west porch.

The multifaceted applications of the Kalela-column are revealed in the building’s interior. Here they are used as structural support for a second-floor gallery and simultaneously as jambs for two entranceways that lead into the large atelier space. A variant of the Kalela-column features in the balustrades of the second-floor gallery and the staircase at the atelier’s east end. Gallén also introduced the Kalela-column into the frame of his private altarpiece, Ad Astra, which he carved at Kalela in 1899. Detailed designs for a portal supported by Kalela-columns survive from the same year. Gallén may have made these as preparatory designs for the Finnish Pavilion at the forthcoming Exposition Universelle in Paris or for some other commission.

The artist was clearly pleased with the Kalela-column. As his biographer Onni Okkonen notes, the arcade on Kalela’s west façade “was for Gallén the most precious special feature of his building.” The most famous pictorial manifestations of the Kalela-column appear in the woodcuts Inspiration (1896)—a self-portrait of the artist absorbed in creative thought by Kalela’s fireplace—and Ex Libris Mary & Axel Gallén (1896) that depicts the couple on Kalela’s west porch looking across Lake-Ruovesi at the village church and the small black cross that marks the grave of their firstborn, Impi Marjatta, who died while Kalela was under construction. Kalela-columns are prominently displayed in other exterior views the wilderness studio as well. In Portrait of a Girl (1897) this icon of Gallén’s architecture gives linear definition and structural logic to the painting’s monochrome background.

The rectangular shape of the Kalela-column is echoed in Kalela’s façades and interior walls constructed of hewed logs. In Gallén’s early designs for a wilderness studio the construction material is round timber as in many Karelian houses. Gallén introduced the rectangular log into Kalela’s construction drawings in 1893-1894, around the same time as he eliminated surface ornamentation from the plans. The formal affinity between the geometric Kalela-column and Kalela’s flat walls give the building a uniform structural melody—a proclivity towards “linear abstraction,” to use Robert Rosenblum’s term—and attach the building to a long tradition of primitive or Doricist neoclassicism. This tradition, like Kalela and Gallén’s art in general, is punctuated by romantic impulses, mixed glimpses cast towards an ineffable past. However, as the latter by definition do not constitute a style and as formal criteria are pronouncedly amorphous, it is inappropriate to speak, as is often done, of a “national romantic style” in reference to Kalela. To this extent the histories of style and ideas must be differentiated, their interrelation studied through distinct methodologies. Here it is important to remember that form itself is apolitical, that it is politicized and becomes ideological only through its place, context, and uses in a given society at a given time.

Kalela’s seminal role in Finnish cultural history derives from its role as the setting where Gallén conceived his most important Kalevala paintings, pressed the pioneering leafs of modern Finnish graphic art, experimented with stained-glass painting, and made the designs for the textiles, furniture, and large frescoes for the Finnish Pavilion at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle. The wilderness studio’s symbiotic, organic relationship with the surrounding landscape lies at the heart of each of these projects.

The terrain around Kalela features as the setting for several of Gallén’s most important mythological images, the organic details of nature metamorphose into abstract lines and colors in his design work, and the lake and forest that surround the building function as its natural frame. Gallén was so deeply enamored by and attuned to the importance of the landscape around Kalela that he regretted the fact that a few pine trees had to be cut down to make space for the building. “It was Gallén’s intention to disturb as little of the site as possible and the house was fitted in rather than having it push nature out” (Marc Treib, “Gallen-Kallela: A Portrait of the Artist as Architect,” Architectural Association Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 3, 1975, 3-13).

Design for a neoclassical Wilderness Studio, 1894

Kalela-column, west porch.

Kalela’s west porch.

Ex Libris Mary et Axel Gallén, 1896, woodcut.

Against the Wind, 1897.

Where possible, he opted for conservationist measures. Instead of leveling the rocky terrain in the northeastern corner of the construction site, the artist introduced an elevated “music podium” into his design thus accommodating the topography of the underlying terrain. And in order to avoid damage to a pine tree that to this day stretches diagonally towards the sky from a point less than fifty centimeters off Kalela’s southeastern corner, he paid a double salary to the carpenter responsible for the construction of this section.

Gallén’s wilderness studio is, in other words, a precocious example of architecture that obliges rather than invades nature. At the same time, although inseparable from the surrounding terrain, Kalela—like the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens—firmly declares its structural autonomy. And also like the Parthenon, it became a model for future architectural design but ultimately, due to its intimate site-specific identity, remained inimitable. In a 1931 obituary to Akseli Gallen-Kallela (the artist’s official name after 1907), the architect Pauli E. Blomstedt (1900-1935) examined Gallén’s and Kalela’s significance to Finnish architecture. Following a critique of the popular view that Kalela is a product of ornamental Karelianism, Blomstedt arrives at the following synthesis:

That unadorned, purely architectonic vision that in primitive vernacular buildings and all organic architecture alike has been the first and absolute condition of authentic art emerges from amidst nineteenth-century surface decoration for the first time in this building. […] Those outward features which in our applied arts are associated with Gallén’s name do not seem timely at the moment: the national or nationalistic form-world is more foreign to the present conception than ever before. And this is how it should be. For the purely formal aesthetic pursuits of architecture have never generated enduring, vivacious periods. Examined in this light the surface patterns of our 1890s architecture will fade as secondary features and from underneath them will emerge the leading ideas of the era: only from within itself, for the sake of the homeland's spiritual and material development, can a people establish the future of its architecture. In this respect those late nineteenth-century ideological traditions will be required to form the basis for the “new” architectural conception whose point of departure is now the potential of this country and whose objective is their development towards international expediency. The tradition of national romanticism is now succeeded by national rationalism. For without a national base, in the deepest sense, our architecture can never grow to organically accommodate the existing conditions of this country. Without this nature-based foundation even our most scientific architectural activity cannot develop the independent standard of comparison that international cooperation seems to most require from the architects of all countries.—In this respect the ideologies of the era which with us began with Gallen-Kallela will never grow old.

Blomstedt’s obituary spells out the point this essay has attempted to illustrate: that Gallén’s wilderness studio Kalela is not an expression of an amorphous national romantic impulse, a product of eclectic historicism, but a functional structure influenced by classical principles of design and treatment of volumes. Kalela, that is, stands as a multifaceted metonym of the national, internationally legible ideals that fueled Gallén’s art since the day he set out on his artist’s path in the early 1880s. Finland’s nature, people and language—not passing artistic styles or the ornaments that modify them—lie at the root of this vision.

Gallén was acutely aware of architecture’s importance to a people’s sense of national identity. A passage from the artist’s unpublished memoirs reveals his awareness of Finnish architecture’s humble history and underscores his desire, on the one hand, to connect this history to universal formal roots and, on the other, to disassociate it from the tradition of modern eclecticism:

For a long time I have wondered why the Finnish people in particular have been endowed with striking poverty in the field of architecture. I realized early on that our old wood buildings—barns, granaries, churches, bell towers, etc.—were a so-called Scandinavian loan, but by gradually focusing on the question of proportion of forms and their special features two questions arose: can any human or even zoological building type be found that does not stem from the same root? That neighbors influence one another and that travel-routes bring styles together is obvious. But is this custom of borrowing, the quest for beauty and rational functionality ultimately degrading to its products. The second question that arises when speaking of a [stylistic] loan concerns the definition of the [loan] giver and taker.

Their relation has been persistently violated by the selfish accounts of the epoch’s greatest chroniclers. And in this field debate is futile. The truth still remains in front of us: in a comparison of the products of times past and the products of contemporary eclecticism the latter unavoidably lose.

This passage sheds light Gallén’s somewhat surprising turn to Doric prototypes and neoclassic formal lucidity in Kalela’s architecture. Clearly, the artist wanted to construct a building that is not simply a nineteenth-century derivative but a timeless classic in which the heroism of ancient temples is coupled with the humbleness of Finnish barns and rural cottages. Regardless of this ambitious intention, however, the result is hardly free of eclecticism. Kalela, almost in spite of itself, is locked to a nineteenth-century context and through its aspirations epitomizes the century’s search for new styles. Its national significance lies in the Doricist impulses it gave to Finland’s modern architects from Eliel Saarinen to Alvar Aalto. As early as 1903, Gustaf Strengell summarized developments in contemporary Finnish architecture by stating that Kalela “has had a deep and even enduring effect on that building style which today is called Finnish. Gallen's wilderness hut is the point of origin for the first impulses that spawned the building that has caused a shift in contemporary Finnish architecture, the Finnish Pavilion at the Paris Exposition Universelle.”

Traditional tools and craft objects collected and used by the artist.

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Postscript: A Note on Kalela’s Later Vicissitudes

Axel Gallén and his family lived at Kalela for over ten years: first from 1895 to 1901; then briefly in the summer of 1905; and again from 1915 to 1921 (for further details, see the Biographical Outline ). The artist perceived Kalela and the sparsely populated rural terrain around the building as a regenerative microcosm of Finland. Following the pattern of his earlier rural sojourns at Keuruu,

Korpilahti, Karelia, and Paanajärvi, at Kalela Gallén culled inspiration and motifs from the details of nature, the features and habits of the people, and the surrounding architecture. With epic intent he metamorphosed these into monumental visions that today are regarded as icons of Finnish national identity.

After departing from Kalela in September 1921, Akseli Gallen-Kallela never returned to his wilderness studio. Kalela was uninhabited for over fifteen years and during this period sustained considerable damage induced both by the forces of nature and the vandalizing force of the human hand. In the summer of 1937, the artist Jorma Gallen-Kallela moved to Kalela with his family and launched and extensive restoration operation. The first phase of Kalela’s historic preservation was brought to completion by 1939 and the building was, once again, destined to become an artist’s home and studio. Jorma Gallen-Kallela’s time at Kalela, however, was cut short by the tragic events of World War II. Lieutenant of Cavalry Jorma Gallen-Kallela fell in battle on 1 December 1939 becoming the first Finnish officer to die in the Winter War of 1939-1940.

Jorma Gallen-Kallela with his wife Pirkko and daughter Aivi, ca.1938

The fourth generation at Kalela 1976.

Jorma’s work at Kalela was continued by his wife Pirkko Gallen-Kallela (1906-1999), a talented interpreter of classical music, and daughter, interior designer Aivi Gallen-Kallela who is Kalela’s present Director. Aivi Gallen-Kallela has developed Kalela into an internationally competitive museum and in conjunction with her curatorial work has written extensively on Gallen-Kallela. Kalela opened its doors to the public for the first time in the summer of 1965. Since then, changing “special theme” summer exhibitions at Kalela presenting the work of three generations of artists have become popular among art-lovers from all over the world, and many travel great distances on their pilgrimage to this shrine of art and beauty.