Sculptor, conservator, professor Jussi Mäkinen is Finland's most famous animal sculptor. He was highly regarded during his lifetime and also enjoyed financial success. Alongside his artistic career, he worked for a long time as a conservator at the Zoological Museum of the University of Helsinki. Jussi Mäntynen grew up in a modest carpenter's home in the Hermanstad district of Helsinki. Around the turn of the century, the area was purely rural and had a very rich fauna. Mäntynen was interested in animals from childhood and became intimately acquainted with them when he worked as an assistant to the preparator at the Helsinki University Zoological Museum from 1910 to 1919 and later as a conservator until 1939.

 

He developed his talents as a sculptor mainly from 1912 to 1920 as a private student of Alpo Sailo, although he also studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in the spring semesters of 1901 and 1904. Mäntynen is one of the few Finnish sculptors who, with a less conventional educational background, managed to become successful, including financially, and who was already highly regarded during his lifetime. His peculiar educational background and exclusive focus on animal motifs are likely to have been the reason why he was only slowly appreciated by other sculptors and by the Finnish art-buying public. His debut as a sculptor was also special: he made sculptures for the prize winners at an agricultural exhibition in 1922 and continued at the first hunting exhibition in Finland, organised in connection with the fourth Nordic hunting congress at the University of Helsinki in 1924. Among them were a huge plaster moose and a large wooden relief depicting a moose family, called “Forward”.

 

Mäntynen studied on his own by getting acquainted with art museums and especially animal sculptures, both in Berlin in 1919–1920 and in Paris in 1926–1927 and 1934. The more radical movements in the art of the time did not interest him, while the Art Deco style, which had some roots in Assyrian and Egyptian art, led him to refine and emphasise the linearity and vitality of animals. A couple of successful private exhibitions in Stockholm in 1934 and in London in 1939 were decisive for his career. Mäntynen resigned from his position as a conservator in 1939 and settled on Lidingö in Sweden in 1943. The conservator position had not been full-time, though. Thanks to an understanding manager, his working day was three hours long and his vacation was as long as university professors' vacations. An extensive production of sculptures would have been impossible under other circumstances. In Sweden, the better sales opportunities and greater public interest attracted him. Mäntynen returned to Finland in 1967, and the city of Turku arranged a residence for him. At the same time, Mäntynen donated a large collection of sculptures to the Turku Art Museum and later, on various occasions, so many works that the art museum now owns almost 120 of his works.

 

The animals he mainly depicted in his sculptures were bears, lynxes and moose; Later, large birds such as swans, cranes and eagles also came into the picture. These wild Nordic animals are associated with hunting and also have allegorical and symbolic meanings. The poses that Mäntynen's animals take are typical of the species, vivid and representative. The animals pose as the king of the wilderness, as agile predators in the forest or as tall moose with a stately crown. The sculptor has said that he also thought of Hiisi's moose in the Kalevala when he sculpted the moose statue in Torkelsparken in Viborg (1924, cast 1928). Mäntynen's fauna also includes cute cubs and moose calves and some clearly humorous works such as "Kallela's Lynx" (1935).

 

Mäntynen's best period was the time after his trip to Paris in the 1930s, when his style became more flexible and he freed himself from naturalism. Inspired by Francois Pompon and his famous Polar Bear in its sleek and simplified form he made 3 different Polar Bears and one of them above. Exhibition catalogue Gösta Serlachius Art Museum, Mänttä, Finland, 28 April - 1 October 1995, marble specimen depicted on p. 60 (cat no. 55, there called loneley Polar Bear ). "Animal sculptures by Jussi Mäntynen", Ensio Rislakki (ed.), 1949. Cf. marble specimen depicted on p. 77.

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