Akseli Gallen-KallelaSpring© Finnish National Gallery / Central Art Archives / Photo Hannu Aaltonen
Along with the Musée d'Orsay, and in collaboration with the Finnish Institute in Paris, the association
The Birch and the Star. Finnish Perspectives on the long nineteenth-century is organising an international symposium on representations of the North in art. The visual arts, music and literature from the turn of the 19th century will be at the centre of this encounter. There will be an examination of how Naturalist and Symbolist artists, authors and composers created a mythical image of the North as an Arctic space of solitude, silence and melancholy; the symbols and myths used in the narrative of the North; how these images were received and interpreted in different cultural contexts.