Laila Pullinen

Executed 1965.

A memory of Marilyn Monroe

A Memory of Marilyn Monroe (1965, height 85 cm in Belgian black marble and cast bronze) is a key work of Laila Pullinen, which together with the stone-bronze combination sculptures Renaissance Figure (1963) and Pro Patria / Do you remember the Winter War? (1970) forms one of the principal gravitation-themed collections among her early works.

The work is in Belgian black marble, a material that in no way corresponds to the black Hyvinkää granite that Pullinen used for Renaissance Figure. These exceptionally high quality materials were already almost entirely quarried out at this time.

“A Memory of Marilyn Monroe is a fine example of Pullinen’s unconventional knack of combining various materials in her sculptures. With this dense, dark, weighty and often smoothly polished stone and ebony, she has used bronze cast for a living surface. The hardness, compact shape and static character of the stone combine with the various forms of shiny bronze to engender a striking contrast.

While the solid shiny black marble of A Memory of Marilyn Monroe does not present a naturalist womanly body, its curved forms have a feminine softness that alludes to the female archetype of its model. The undulating shape cast in bronze may depict Marilyn’s hairstyle, but may also be a garment that drapes the body and, as if by accident, flutters in the breeze in innocent revelation,” writes Tiinaliisa Mattila in The Art of Finland, vol. 6: The Present Day, edited by Markku and Olli Valkonen (WSOY, 1986).

The name again serves as a key. The work is based on a well-known cover photograph from an Italian newspaper showing stretcher-bearers carrying the dead body of Marilyn into an ambulance. The naked body had been hastily draped in a dark shroud, through which the outline of her hip was nevertheless discernible.

Pullinen discovered something transcendental and sublime in the death of a woman torn between the world of men and politics. The work is a memento mori, immortalising in marble a post-mortem instant when the skin under the shroud was still warm and vibrant. The full, rounded feminine curves of the stone are languid and almost pleasurable, with the polished bronze expressing the soul or spirit freed from the bonds of matter.

“I think Marilyn was a genuine artist with the soul and ambitious goals of an artist,” is how Laila Pullinen explained her view of the subject.

The Finnish classic novelist Mika Waltari took an instant shine to the work on viewing it at the residence of Finnish consul Miss Musa Silver in Milan, where it was held in transit between two private showings in Milan and Turin. The original object of admiration, Sun Carrier / Mata Hari II (1965), was purchased by WSOY publishers at Waltari’s request and bequeathed to the University of Tampere on the occasion of its opening ceremony for display in the lobby, where it remains to this day.

Waltari was keen to take personal charge of the smaller work.

The circumstances of this acquisition were explained in an October 2014 radio interview with Laila Pullinen:

“Waltari had playfully told Silver that he ‘wanted Marilyn in his bedroom’. In fact he had been impressed by the gravitation theme of the works: this former member of the influential Flame Carriers literary group now elegantly christened the standing work Sun Carrier, and acknowledged the same thematic structure in the smaller work. As a writer, Waltari was captivated by the closing line of the Eino Leino Hymn to the Fire that inspired my work: ‘For body’s Earth and Heaven is the Spirit*’.”

He felt that it was the destiny of the work ‘to bring the light of culture from the cradle of antiquity to the University of Tampere’.

My own view is that Mika Waltari rescued the two principal works of the Milan exhibition for the Finnish nation.”

As the sculptor noted at the time:

“Author Mika Waltari views the collection in Milan and urges WSOY to purchase the large Mata Hari, renaming it Sun Carrier. WSOY bestows the work as an inaugural donation to the University of Tampere, and Waltari writes a memorial verse to the artist for the presentation ceremony in Helsinki:

‘Eye of pearl, song of bird
fly to distant shore,
do not go back, do not return,
To homeland come no more.’

Waltari purchased the marble A Memory of Marilyn Monroe work for his own collection.”

• extract from Laila Pullinen’s working journal, recorded in Pullinen, (Finnish Art Society / Otava, 1994)

Jean Ramsay