Tove Jansson: "Work and Love"

The Finnish artist and writer knew what made a meaningful life

One of the highlights of my month in Paris was “The Houses of Tove Jansson” exhibit. It was only on for a month, tucked away at the end of an impasse, a dead-end street, in the 11^th arrondissement. It was held in a vast, nondescript building, a former print house, full of stairs and different rooms on various levels. It was the perfect venue for staging Jansson’s oeuvre, which was so varied as to lead my friend to say in astonishment, as we left the exhibit, “She was as prolific as Picasso!” (But Picasso wasn’t also a writer. Well, he did write a bunch of poetry, apparently, but it’s not something he’s known for, whereas Jansson was equally artist and author.)

Each room of the building explored another aspect of Jansson’s work—her time in Paris painting seriously, her love of the sea, her books for adults and children, her work as an illustrator (including many anti-fascist works during WWII), and one of my favorites, “A Room of One’s Own,” about her atelier in downtown Helsinki. There was also a room devoted to her creation of the Moomin universe, for which she is most known. All over Europe, children grow up reading about Moomin, a cute, hippo-like character, and his family and friends. As a result, Jansson, like Louisa May Alcott, is more known for her work for children. But, also like Alcott, she was a serious artist with great ambitions. Philip Pullman has nicely summed her up as “a genius, a woman of profound wisdom and great artistry.”

Tove Jansson’s Life

Tove’s parents (both Swedish) met in art school in Paris, where she was conceived. Back in Finland, they raised her in an environment suffused with art of all kinds. It was the air she breathed. When she was 16, they sent her to art school in Stockholm, and in her twenties she, too, lived in Paris, where she attended the École des Beaux-Arts and other schools. I love the paintings she did from this period, with their rich textures and palettes.  

Even more, though, Jansson created her own life. As the curators of the exhibition put it, she “created a set of her own rules as a female and queer artist operating in a male-dominated universe in the years before and after World War II.” She didn’t leave home when she married, as young women were supposed to do then. She left, at 28, to move into her own studio. Two years later, she found a larger one even farther away. She described it to a friend as “a studio one could spend a lifetime perfecting if one wanted to,” which is exactly what she did over nearly sixty years until her death.

I also love that Tove Jansson longed for “an island of her own,” as the curators say, surrounded by the sea that she loved. She had grown up spending summers on islands or by the sea, where she would build tents or huts for herself. She seems to have felt most at home on islands. In the 1950s, she and her brother, Lars, rented an island on which they each built their own cabin. Here is what her biographer Boel Westin writes about islands in Jansson’s life: “The island is a place for adventure, renewal of life and transformation, a place where one can build up one’s life and create a world of one’s own.”

A Great Love

In her forties, Tove found a great love, someone who also loved islands. She had crossed paths at various times with the graphic artist Tuulikki Pietilä, Tooti, and after meeting again in December 1955, they fell in love. In the early 1960s, Tooti was able to buy a flat in the same apartment block as Tove’s studio. They both wanted their own space and lived independent lives, yet together. Through an attic passage, they could visit each other and have dinner together.

In 1964, at the age of the 50, she and Tuulikki found an uninhabited island to share, where they built a cabin and spent the next thirty summers, until it became too difficult to make the journey there.

Tove and Tooti on their island, Klovharun

Tove wrote to her during one of their separations:

Wherever I go on the island, you’re with me as my security and stimulation, your happiness and vitality are still here, everywhere. And if I left here, you would go with me. You see, I love you as if bewitched, yet at the same time with profound calm, and I’m not afraid of anything life has in store for us. . . . Everything I do, everything new that I see—there’s a parallel reflection: I shall show this to Tuulikki. Waiting is a sheer pleasure when it’s for you—and the calm awareness that all I have to do is add together a number of days, and we’ll see each other again. [See “Tove Jansson Falls in Love]

The Many Sides of Tove Jansson

Tove Jansson reinvented herself many times over and that she was as much of a writer as she was an artist, a rare accomplishment. She began publishing her Moomin books, alongside a successful career as a painter and illustrator, in 1945.

Tove Jansson, “Tove Jansson and the Moomin Characters,” n.d.

The stories were as important as the illustrations, the first book being a response to the war, in fact. They “frequently combine whimsical, enchanting storybook scenarios with the most dreadful existential threats,” according to a writer in The Yale Review. [See “Tove Jansson’s Genius.”] Her last Moomin book was published in 1970, by which time she had begun reinventing herself again, this time as an author for adults.

Over the next thirty years, while the Moomin universe lived on (in comic strips, television shows, even as an opera and a theme park), she wrote five novels and five collections of short stories, as well as a nonfiction book. Her most well-known book is The Summer Book (1972). She had had great literary ambitions since at least her adolescence. Westin writes that at the age of fourteen, “she wanted to tell stories and write, publish and be read, earn her own living and help support the family.” (The exact same could be said of Alcott.) Four of her books have been translated into English and reprinted by New York Review of Books Classics.

Meanwhile, Janssen was still painting and drawing. As she once wrote, “Give me a picture, a longing to express myself. It doesn’t have to be much, but it must be something, a little pleasure, a small necessity.” She held multiple “one-man” shows in the 1960s of her increasingly abstract art. And in the mid-1970s she was inspired by a return trip to Paris to pick up her brushes again with new energy. Self-portraits were a common genre for her, and she once wrote, “Every still-life, every landscape, every canvas is a self-portrait!!” I love how much her art—and her writing—are direct expressions of herself.

Tove Jansson, Lynx boa (self-portrait), 1942

Work and Love

Fittingly, her ex libris motto was “Work and Love,” a motto she lived by (and in that order, apparently). Westin describes the design: “Here we find work and sex, love and passion, fidelity and temptation, and not least Leo, her personal star sign.”

Tove Janssen, “Labora et Amare” (“Work and Love,” although she mixed up the grammar, apparently)

As I’ve been traveling and trying to figure out what I want in the next stage of my life, I’ve decided to adopt Jansson’s motto as my own. Meaningful work and meaningful love—they are what we all deserve, but, in my experience, they don’t just come to us. We have to seek them out.

And then there is simply Tove Jansson’s spirit: “Do not tire, never lose interest, never grow indifferent—lose your invaluable curiosity and you let yourself die. It’s as simple as that,” she wrote in Fair Play. The novel is about the lives of a pair of women artists, based on her and Tooti. I long to read it after seeing the description of the New York Review of Books edition:

Fair Play is the type of love story that is rarely told, a revelatory depiction of contentment, hard-won and exhilarating.

Mari is a writer and Jonna is an artist, and they live at opposite ends of a big apartment building, their studios connected by a long attic passageway. They have argued, worked, and laughed together for decades. Yet they’ve never really stopped taking each other by surprise. Fair Play shows us Mari and Jona’s intertwined lives as they watch Fassbinder films and Westerns, critique each other’s work, spend time on a solitary island (recognizable to readers of Jansson’s The Summer Book), travel through the American Southwest, and turn life into nothing less than art. 

That’s it for now. I’ll be in your inboxes again soon with more to tell you about my explorations of women writers and artists. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you love about Tove Jansson. Did you already know about her? (She was new to me.) Have you read any of her books? If so, which do you recommend I start with?

All the best,

Anne

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More on Tove Jansson

“Houses of Tove Jansson” Exhibition

Boel Westin, Tove Jansson: Life, Art, and Words, The Authorised Biography (Sort Of Books, 2013).

Tuula Karjalainen, Tove Jansson: Work and Love (Penguin, 2014).

“Tove Jansson Falls in Love” (her letters to Tooti), LitHub, 2020.

Evan James, “Tove Jansson’s Genius,” The Yale Review, 2020.

Two websites with a plethora of information: https://tovejansson.com/ and https://www.moomin.com/en/ (mostly about the Moomin universe).

 Tove Jansson’s self-portraits (google search)

“Indulgence in Life: The Symbiosis of Art and Sex in Zaida Bergroth's Tove”—about a film about Tove Jansson that I’m dying to see