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Various properties, Toini Muona, Heinä (Grass) vase, ca. 1945, produced by Arabia, Helsinki, Fi...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:8,000.00 - 10,000.00 USD
Various properties, Toini Muona, Heinä (Grass) vase, ca. 1945, produced by Arabia, Helsinki, Fi...
Various properties
Toini Muona
"Heinä" (Grass) vase, ca. 1945
produced by Arabia, Helsinki, Finland; porcelain with incised decoration, cream glaze
incised marks to the underside "TM"
17 1/8 in. (43.6 cm) high
Estimate: $8,000-10,000
Literature
Marjut Kumela, Toini Muona Arabia
1931-1970, Helsinki, 1988, p. 13
Jennifer Hawkins Opie, Scandinavian Ceramics & Glass in the Twentieth Century, London, 1989, p. 22
(for similar example)
Marianne Aav and Nina Stritzler-Levine, eds., Finnish Modern Design: Utopian Ideals and Everyday, 1930-1997, New Haven and London, 1998, pp. 283 and 371
The Heinä vases were among Muona's works that won the Gold medal at the Milan Triennale in 1951.



Toini Muona was the leading ceramic artist of the modern movement in Finland and one of the pioneering figures towards the development in “organic modernism.”
Muona studied ceramics at Helsinki Central School of Arts, with Maija Grotell, who subsequently went on to New York and the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. In the 1930s, Muona was employed at Arabia, where she progressed from junior “decorator” to holding her first solo exhibition in 1932 at the Museum of Applied Arts. She continued as a leading figure at Arabia throughout the 1930s, producing work that was classicist and cubist, with a team of artisans who together were creating the Finnish modern aesthetic.
The lots offered here are from Muona’s postwar period when Finland was struggling to emerge from hardship and shortages. Muona expressed the optimism of emerging from this darker period with vertical forms symbolizing the new growth and social optimism. This period has been described as when her work fully realized her aesthetic of “sublime perfection.” The vases allude to the shape of the reeds or blades of grass in the Finnish landscape.
In the monograph on Toini Muona, Harri Kalha notes, “It is her pioneering work in vertical forms that has earned Toini Muona most of her international recognition. Her ceramics anticipated and inspired the shift from geometric or bulbous forms to the ascending organic contours that later came to be regarded a generic feature of Scandinavian modernism.” Muona continued to be a trailblazer for the Finnish applied arts during the 1950s to late 1960s, where she took her art forms to a further abstract modernism and ultimately into works of minimalism devoid of the texture and color of her early work–she always however had a connectivity of the abstract and the organic running through her work.