TOVE JANSSON—THE STORYTELLER

From very early on, Tove Jansson was passionate about becoming artist, and she planned her life with that goal in mind. Indeed, she did have a long career as a painter, in which she was active, productive, and successful. However, to us she is known first and foremost as a writer, illustrator, and comic-strip artist, and above all the creator of Moomin Valley. Her great international fame has partially obscured something that for her was one of the most important things for many decades.

As the daughter of sculptor Viktor Jansson, she learned from an early age to live among art. She also grew up watching her mother Signe Hammersten-Jansson work designing stamps, book covers, and illustrations. At home, art was always in the making. Art and life were not separate: they were natural parts of existence. Her first and most influential teacher was her mother, and she learned to draw literally sitting on her lap. Tove Jansson's technical skills were enormous. Her lines were alive, effortless, and perfect as they emerged. This is one reason for the ongoing and ever-growing love for Moomins.

An allegory of war

Tove Jansson received extensive international training, first studying in Stockholm, then in Helsinki, and later in Paris. She traveled a good deal throughout Europe and had a great interest in museums. Her paintings from the thirties have a powerful aura of unreality and downright strangeness--in her works it seems that anything can happen at any time. They were influenced by Surrealism yet also testify to the artist's fascination with telling a story--preferably a mystical, enchanted story. She was acknowledged as a bold and promising young painter.

World War II affected Jansson's life deeply, but it was not something that she wanted to paint. Instead she concentrated on still lifes of lovely flowers to counterbalance the prevailing fear. The story about Moomin Valley she began at the time served the same purpose--to escape from the gloom. The first Moomin books can be read as an allegory of war.

She was fascinated with the human face

Selling paintings and illustrations provided her with a regular income, and she also earned decent money designing, for example, Christmas cards. However, she devoted her main artistic activity to creating illustrations for various magazines and newspapers. Those done for "Garm," a Finnish-Swedish magazine, were particularly bold, even reckless. Her intense criticism of Stalin and Hitler could have been fatal for her had the war have ended differently.

Her art was close to her own life and issued from her personality; this was true for her paintings, novels, and Moomins. The subject she was most fascinated with was the human face. One of the most interesting parts of her works were her self-portraits, such as Lynx boa (1942), and pictures of her own family, such as The Family (1942). At the same time that she was painting the latter, she was also creating the Moomin family.

Her talent: images and words

She produced her wonderful picture books The Book about Moomin, Mymble, and Little My (1952) and Who Will Comfort Toffle? (1960), and wrote numerous Moomin books. It was a hectic time for her, which may have may be due to the conflict that had begun to trouble her--the difficult personal choice of where to direct her artistic ambitions: toward painting, illustrations, or writing--a hard decision for such a multitalented person. It was partly for reasons of money, in fact the lack of it, that drove her to sign a contract with the "Evening News" to produce comic strips. These allowed her to combine both aspects of her talent, images and words, and the result was much more than the sum of the parts.

But after seven years she did not want to continue and decided to begin painting seriously. However, the art world had become very different, and abstract art was dominant among younger artists. It was not easy for her to abandon figuration, since she was also a passionate storyteller in her paintings. She concentrated more and more on writing for adults, which she loved. And of course the Moomin Valley took up a large share of her time and energy with all the films, theater productions, books, and new translations. The period she spent in Paris in 1975 was like a swan song for her art. She painted wonderful works such as a portrait of her beloved Tuulikki Pietilä, several still lifes, and above all the vivid and strong self-portrait at sixty-one, an age at which she seems to have seen and understood everything about life.