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FROM 1974 TO 1977 Torsten Jurell made a series of woodcuts about the
socialist movement and the revolution in Finland, which he compares
with the Paris Commune. In these, namned Red Blood - White Frost,
he described first how conditions for the peasant farmers grew ever
worse under the Czarist regime, then Finland’s independence in 1917 and
finally the confrontation between the Reds (the smallholders and
workers) and the Whites (the gentleman-farmers and the bourgeoisie).
At the outbreak of the Revolution on 27 January 1918, a People’s
Council was created in Helsinki and all public services were put into
the hands of workers’ soviets. However, as early as the following
March, the White Army, with soldiers well-trained in Germany fighting
under the orders of General Gustav Mannerheim, beat off the Reds, whose
officers lacked experience; the whole country was “liberated” by the
end of April.
In 1984, an anthology of his engravings were published in a book called
Red Blood, White Frost, published by “Mannerheim and Mannerheim”,
nephew of the White Army chief of staff. The captions and other
comments on the pictures are bilingual (Swedish and Finnish). |
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Image: Linoprint "Finland 1918".
First image of the theme (1974).
(The image is not included in Red Blood - White Frost.)
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NB! In the menu you will find the images one by one. Unfortunately the titles ore the short texts about the history are not available in English yet…
Look at the images in a slideshow...
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prints