Birger Kaipiainen is one of Finland's most successful and well-known ceramic artists: his work played its part in Finland's world conquest in the field of modern applied art. Kaipiainen settled into a three-dimensional language of form, producing reliefs made of ceramic fragments or beads.
Background
Birger Kaipiainen was born in Pori in 1915, the youngest in a family of seven children. Just a year later, however, the family moved to Helsinki's Fredrikinkatu Street. In the mid 1920s, Birger was sent for his summer holidays to Sortavala on Lake Ladoga, where he was cared for by the Baranovskis, a childless and cultured emigre couple. Helen Baranovski had attended art school in St Petersburg, and the family's circle of friends provided the young romantic with a first taste of international ways and habits.
Education
The precocious and artistically-minded boy devoured literature and enjoyed drawing, but was not getting on well at school, especially in mathematics. Birger's mother finally contacted Arttu Brummer and anxiously told him about her son, who was merely running after butterflies in the fields and immersing himself in looking at flowers. Brummer took the teenage boy under his wing at the Ateneum's Central School for Applied Arts {taideteollisuuskeskuskoulu). Kaipiainens studies coincided with the years of functionalism, when attempts were being made to strip applied art of all sentimentality and decorativeness. But Kaipiainen stuck stubbornly - and with the encouragement of his understanding teachers - to his poetic pictorial world.
Career
In 1937, Birger Kaipiainen was invited to join the art department at the Arabia factory, which was at that time making a name for itself as the flagship of free applied an. He immediately distinguished himself through his original range of themes from a group of artists that was in any case special.
The basic tone of Kaipiainen's works is nostalgia, a yearning for the Elsewhere - for a more beautiful world, for memories gilded by time, for an escape from the present, from everyday existence.
His works from the first half of the decade have a mournful atmosphere about them but are solemnly timeless, far removed from the daily reality of the war. Onto large wall-plates and tiles, he used pastel shades to conjure dreamy serenades in romantic forest interiors, or harlequins, or a youth fishing for stars and surrounded by floating female fantasies. Many works repeat an elegiacal female figure with streaming hair; in her facial features, one seems to recognise Kaipiainen s own profile.
At the beginning of 1949, Kaipiainen was given the opportunity to work in Italy for Fiichard Ginori. The results were shown at a small-scale exhibition in Milan. The stay in Italy ultimately led to a stylistic period characrerised by pasrel-hued dreams and harking nostalgically back to the early Renaissance. His love of the female subject was preserved, but thenceforth it was marked more strongly by a styling and frontal expression reminiscent of Massimo Campigli's female figures.
For Finnish applied art, the 1950s were a period of free creativity and experimentation. Nothing seems to have restrained Kaipiainens imagination. Early in the decade, he began to move from 'faience painting' towards a three-dimensional language of form. The results were reliefs consisting of ceramic fragments or beads, free-standing, skittle-like female figures, or long, ingot-like wall figures. In 1950 Kaipiainen was given a welcome task - that of designing the costumes and sets for Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty. Twenty years later, Kaipiainen did the sets for Yukio Mishima's Madame de Sade at Helsinki's Svenska Tea-tern (Swedish Theatre). In the 1980s, he also designed the costumes for August Srrindberg's Gustav Vasa at the same theatre.
For the Montreal Expo in 1967, Kaipiainen constructed a gigantic 'Sea of Violets' (Orvokkimeri), which was later placed in the meeting chamber of the Tampere City Council.
With his romantic artist's soul, Birger Kaipiainen steered clear of socially oriented design work. At the request of the Arabia factory's management, he finally agreed to design some models for series production. The Tapetti pressed-copper ornament was in production from 1953 to 1962. The late 1960s saw the birth of the Paratiisi tableware set with its luxuriant fruit-and-flower ornamentation. The manufacture of this set stopped in the mid 1970s, but it has since come back into production with small changes. Today it is regarded as one of the classics of Finnish design.
Kaipiainen was granted an artist's pension in 1981, after which he continued his work on a freelance basis, continuing to arrive at the Arabia factory almost daily.