Finnish art - Erkki Tanttu - Folk Sayings

Erkki Tanttu (1907-1985) was a popular Finnish cartoonist and illustrator in the mid-20th century. He is best known for illustrating hundreds of Finnish folk sayings in a format similar to a magazine cartoon or a gag panel. Eleven book compilations of these were published from 1945 to 1976. In real life these "winged words" were used as short parables or ironic metaphors, but Tanttu typically chose to depict the literal meaning of the words. Today, the value of these drawings is in the ethnographic detail in which they observe how Finnish people of old looked, dressed and worked. This work also lead Tanttu to illustrate many classic works of Finnish literature.

In a much more simplistic style, Tanttu also drew the weekly comic strip Rymy-Eetu for over 40 years, starting in the early 1930s. The strips originally ran without words, but a selection of them was annually collected into a 16-page comic book every Christmas, and then rhyming typeset captions (written afterwards by someone else) were added below the pictures, perhaps to somehow make them appear more literary, and thus, "worthy".

The artist's son recalls that although the comic strip Rymy-Eetu made his father a hero to his schoolyard friends, to Tanttu himself drawing it was a chore. "He became very grumpy when he had to draw them and preferred to churn out ten at a time." Nevertheless, since the strip was regularly published, it offered the freelance artist the rare luxury of a steady paycheck, so he kept producing it decade after decade.

The folk saying cartoons, on the other hand, were much more pleasant work for the artist - and also, back in the day, much more highly regarded. Tanttu held several exhibitions of his work, and sold many of the originals during his lifetime. Much of his illustration work is inked on tracing paper. His comic pages, however, Tanttu treated very casually, often flipping them over and using the reverse sides (often cut up) for something else, even just as a backing board for his more valued tracing paper drawings. Occasionally he could even use a large page as wrapping paper!

Tanttu also produced hundreds of book covers, and as a fine art project, a line of woodcuts.