Tuulikki Pietilä

Tuulikki Pietilä was born in Seattle to Finnish parents, who returned to Finland when she was a child. Her brother Reima Pietilä became a well-known architect. She studied art in Turku and Helsinki, in Stockholm and at Fernand Léger’s academy in Paris and worked in woodcut, metal engraving, lithography and screen printing. She is regarded as one of Finland’s most influential graphic artists, received the Order of the Lion of Finland in 1963 and in 1982 became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki.

In 1955 she met the artist and writer Tove Jansson. The two women became partners and remained together until Jansson’s death in 2001 – at a time when homosexuality was a crime in Finland until 1971 and classified as an illness until 1981. Pietilä is considered the model for the calm, wise Too-ticky in the Moomin books. Together they built Moomin houses and models; 43 of Pietilä’s three-dimensional pieces are now in the Moomin Museum in Tampere.

For almost thirty summers the couple lived on the small, remote island of Klovharun in the Gulf of Finland. Pietilä filmed their life there and their travels; documentaries were later made from her footage. In 1992 she accompanied Jansson to the Independence Day reception at the Presidential Palace; they have been described as the first female couple to attend as guests.

Pietilä died in Helsinki in 2009, aged 92. She left more than 1,400 works to the Ateneum art museum.