Tuulikki ‘Tooti’ Pietilä (1917–2009)

Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä and Tove Jansson photographed in the late 1950s.

Finnish graphic artist, illustrator and professor Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä (1917–2009) was born in Seattle, USA. She was only three years old when her family moved to Turku, Finland. In 1933, she began studying at the Turku Art School. Three years later, she continued at the Finnish Art Association Art School in Helsinki until 1940. At that time, World War II was raging on the continent and spreading northward. In 1941, Pietilä joined the army’s information department and served three years at the front in Russian Karelia. After the war, she moved to Sweden to resume her artistic career. In 1945, she enrolled at Konstfack, University of Arts, Crafts and Design, in Stockholm and studied graphic technology. In 1949, she moved to Paris and spent her last four years of study at Fernand Léger’s art school. By this time, Peitilä had already exhibited in several art exhibitions, both at home in Finland and abroad.

Her stay in France became an artistic high point in Pietilä’s ambitious creative work. She developed her multi-coloured graphics and completed her first solo exhibition, which was shown in Helsinki in 1951. When she moved back to Finland, she met her life partner, Tove Jansson. Jansson was both a soulmate and an artistic colleague.

The partnership between Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä left a mark in both queer history and the world of arts. Through nearly 50 years together, the couple travelled the world and worked on numerous joint projects in literature, art, and life. Pietilä and Jansson ran a gallery together in Helsinki and spent their summers on a rocky island in the Pellinge archipelago near Porvoo, which they documented in a 1996 book. Pietilä filmed their daily life. The film clips were later included in documentary films.

Tuulikki Pietilä taught at Uniarts, Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts, from 1956 until 1960; later, she taught graphics students and wrote a landmark textbook on graphic design, Metalligrafiikka-kirjan (1978). At the same time, she participated in the work on Tove’s growing Moomin world and was immortalised in Jansson’s personal fairy tale character Too-Ticky.

Pietilä was versatile and experimented with both technique and style. Her early imagery was realistic, colourful, with cityscapes or Finnish archipelagos. She worked early on with multi-coloured graphics, first in lithographs and later in woodcuts, etchings and serigraphs. Pietilä also worked with oil paintings, pastels and drawings. During the 1950s, her expression became increasingly abstract, oscillating between Cubism and Informalism, and creating movement both in her works and in the shifts between styles.

Tove Jansson passed away in 2001 and Tuulikki Pietilä in 2009.

Tuulikki Pietilä was one of Finland’s foremost graphic artists, with hundreds of solo exhibitions. She donate extensive body of work comprising more than 1,400 works to the Finnish National Gallery.  Posthumously in 2017, the Finnish National Gallery, Ateneum, celebrated Pietilä’s 100th anniversary with a retrospective exhibition presenting 170 artworks from 1933 to 1985.