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Beauty And Intrigue Invoked Through Dreamworld Characters – Tove Jansson Exhibition Coming To London29/9/2026 
Moomins Tove Jansson (TM)
People of my generation happily grew up with The Moomins. Unlike the US good and evil powerplays that dominated Saturday morning TV, Tove Jansson’s world of hippo-like trolls and folk-tale people brought a quaint story and kindled ancestral memory to bring us back to a simpler time. Despite being a popular writer and artist, Tove Jansson has yet to be displayed in London. One of the art capitals of the world, London is home to several permanent collections and rotating galleries who proudly exhibit local and international masters.
Jansson is known for sculpting the subtle emotional background of the 90s through her Moomins cartoon, her art goes further back into the 20th Century and depicts a similar theme of homely narrative and curiously cosy plot twists. Tove Jansson’s work went beyond children’s characters too, with novels, satire, literature, and fine art making her repertoire as extensive as it is enlightening. With such a rich and widely consumed back catalogue of her life’s work, the artist, who died in 2001, is finally being recognised in the high-class setting she always belonged to. Tove Jansson was born to an artistic family in 1914. Growing up in Finland, her Scandinavian heritage reveals itself repeatedly in her many artistic forms. With a sculptor father and a graphic artist mother, the synergy between shape, form, narrative, and personality became a natural conduit for Tove’s eventual expression. Falling in love with art as a child, Tove went on to study at various high-class art schools across the continent. She enjoyed several courses and became extremely skilled in some of the most up-to-date techniques of the day. When WWII came about, Tove was already an established artist in her own right. She turned her attention to writing political cartoons to help the Allied cause. Finding anti-fascist messages came naturally to her, with a strong community and tolerance-based upbringing. It was during this time in the 1930s and 40s that her first Moomin characters began to form. Rather than main characters, they began life as fun doodles in the margins, giving flow and whimsy to otherwise serious ideas. It would be another 50 years before their animated stories would reach millions on colour TV. The post-wars years gave rise to a period of introspection and philosophical psychology. It was during these years that the subject matter of The Moomins stories began to form. The interplay between motivations, responsibility, and wonderment, lent to a particular dynamic that resonates throughout life’s little situations. Her work really began to flourish year on year since those early days in propaganda, and the wisdom she acquired around human instinct and social interaction became paramount in her later success. During the 20th Century, Tove Jansson’s work helped to shape the emotional vocabulary of the post-modern European world. Her thoughtful and sentimental creations brought Nordic imagery to life with traditional colours and past-times blending with inventive fantasy and fairy-tale logic. Her subtle resistance to authoritarianism through the establishment of fair and reasonable parent archetypes, trust-worthy and noncompetitive friendships, and patient understanding of new concepts that might not complement daily life as it is, brought a new kind of opposition that didn’t involve fighting. It is also important to recognise that Jansson lived openly with her partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä, at a time when queer relationships were often marginalised or misunderstood. While it’s impossible to say whether this affected institutional recognition, it certainly shaped how her work is viewed today: as part of a broader cultural history of authenticity, courage, and quiet defiance. As the world becomes louder, more visceral, and leans heavily on deep emotional impact, artists like Tove Jansson become more important in reminding us that calm and mindful narratives can do more in the long-term that flash-in-the-pan penny dreadfuls that ultimately get pulped. “Tove Jansson and her Families is at the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration from November 21 2026 to May 9 2027.”- Timeout Tove Jansson on eBay (ad) 
Rendering of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Courtesy of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Artnet
The San Diego Comic Convention always has a few headlines to tell each time it happens. The 2025 edition of the world-famous cultural event was no different. This year saw superstar group Nine Inch Nails make an appearance, alongside cinema hero-freak The Toxic Avenger. Fans of every walk of fantasy and music were treated to an experience to remember with stars of stage and screen rubbing shoulders with producers, writers, and directors and opening the gates of their world. For a few short hours, the showbiz universe collided with that of the masses in full dress, giving fans a real sense of being among the stars.
Something many people were thrilled to see was the first appearance of Star Wars star George Lucas at the well-known festival. The story writer who brought us Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, and R2D2 was there to explain his next big adventure. It’s not a film this time, but a monumental building dedicated to the art of telling stories. The Museum Of Narrative Art. Dubbed “The Temple to the People’s Art” by the man himself, co-founder George Lucas, the venue will help uncover and explain how stories bring common belief systems to the front of our minds, via vivid imaginary situations and the correct action. Perhaps this is why storytelling is still as important today as it always has been, and although time-tested classics can instruct us on all kinds of things, society always meets new challenges and unique perspectives that challenge the old. A 300,000 square foot space dedicated to the art of storytelling will open in 2026, all being well, and is expected to become an integral part of the wider community. Displaying the history of storytelling art, the museum will contain everything from cave paintings and hieroglyphs to film posters and modern animation. The specific expertise required to be an illustrator, either in comic book form or in literary journals, is often overlooked. Lucas is passionate about bringing this specialism and exciting career to the front of the experience. Pictures are a kind of language all in their own, with meanings and suggestions hiding behind often simple or seemingly humdrum depictions. Putting images into the mind that contain emotional relevance and life-lesson style wisdom has been going on since the days of the stone-age. Depicting spears killing animals meant that anyone from anywhere could see the image and know that spears can do this. Pre-language society found a way to pass on the wisdom. Now when we see futuristic films and read comics about strange alternate realities, we can learn all kinds of abstract and useful things about the way the world really works. Recommended read: What Great Paintings Say. Masterpieces in Detail: 100 Masterpieces in Detail (Bibliotheca Universalis) by Rainer and Rose-Marie Hagen |
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AuthorAlternative Fruit by Rowan B. Colver Archives
September 2026
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