The North. An artistic, musical and literary myth

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.

Chaired by: Marja Sakari

• 10am: National Aesthetics
  by Anne-Marie Thiesse, CNRS/ENS Ulm
• 10.40am: Uses of the Finnish Landscape in the Globalisation of Art: from the Origins of Identity to the Paradigms of Modernity
  by Fabienne Chevallier, Musée d'Orsay et de l'Orangerie
• 11am: Break. Screening of the documentary Le Golfe de Finlande, 7mins., 1918, Archives CNC, Paris
• 11.20am: Critical Reception of the Finnish Exhibition at the 1908 Salon d'Automne in Paris
  by Laura Gutman-Hanhivaara, Iclea
• 11.40am: The Vigorous, Virgin North. Gallen-Kallela and the Nordic Painters at the Venice Biennale and in the pages of Emporium
  by Stella Bottai, independent researcher, Rome
• 12 noon: Discussion and break

 

Chaired by: Riikka Stewen

• 2.30pm: The Primitive in the Finnish National Collective Imagination
  by Riikka Rossi, University of Helsinki
• 2.50pm: Art, Nation and the Myth of the Scandinavian Wilderness: Two Views North from 1880s Paris
  by Juliet Simpson, Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, Buckinghamshire New University
• 3.10pm: Break
• 3.30pm: The Myth of the North and the Cultural Exchange between Scandinavia and Fin-de-Siècle Central Europe: Stanislaw Przybyzewski, Edvard Munch, Gustav Vigeland
  by Lidia Gluchowska, University of Oslo and University of Zielona Góra, Poland
• 3.50pm: Discussion
• 7.30pm: Kantele concert, a traditional Finnish musical instrument
  with Eija Kankaanranta, kantele and Maria Puusaari, violin

60 mins, no interval

 

Chaired by: Riikka Rossi

• 10am: The Swan on the River of Death: Nordic melancholy and Symbolism
  by Pirjo Lyytikäinen, University of Helsinki
• 10.40am: Sigbjørn Obstfelder and "Nordic Melancholy"
  by Guri Barstadt, University of Tromsø
• 11am: Break
• 11.20am: Glaciers and polar landscapes in 19th century opera and literature as a metaphor for the "end" of human civilization
  by Maria Birbili, Maison des Sciences de l'Homme
• 11.40am: A Snowy Forest in the Mist. Helene Schjerfbeck, Ellen Thesleff and the Symbolist Reception of Fra Angelico
  by Martin Sundberg, University of Basel
• 12 noon: Discussion

 

Chaired by: Fabienne Chevallier

• 2.30pm: The Rapids at Mäntykoski (1893). Akseli Gallen-Kallela between Nordic Horizontality and Symbolist Verticalism
  by Tomi Mäkelä, Martin-Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, Institut für Musik
• 2.50pm: Sibelius Reception in Britain, 1901-1939: Centre and Periphery in the Musical Construction of the North
  by Philipp Bullock, Wadham College, Oxford University
• 3.10pm: Break
• 3.30pm: Return of the Swan in Juhani Aho's Priest's Wife
  by Jyrki Nummi, University of Helsinki
• 3.50pm: The North imagined by William Morris: "the infinite melody of the northern line"
  by Florence Alibert-Barascud, Clermont University Library and University of Paris Sorbonne
• 4.10pm: 'Under Northern Sky': George Egerton and Women's Sexual Freedom
  by Stefano Evangelista, Trinity College, Oxford University
• 4.30pm: Discussion
• 5pm: Symposium closes