Fanatics

Painted in 1918, 'Fanatics' (known in Finnish as 'Hihhulit,' meaning religious fanatics) is one of Tyko Sallinen's most powerful works, rooted deeply in his own turbulent upbringing. Sallinen was raised in a family strictly devoted to Laestadianism, a fervent revivalist movement within Lutheranism, and he fled that world at age 14. This painting can be read as a raw, visceral reckoning with the intensity — and perhaps suffocation — of that religious culture. Created at a time of tremendous upheaval in Finland, the year of the Finnish Civil War, the work carries an urgency that feels both personal and national.

Sallinen was a founding member of the November Group in 1916, a collective of Finnish expressionists and cubists, and 'Fanatics' exemplifies the expressionist spirit at its most uncompromising. As one of the first Finnish Modernists to champion emotion and individuality over decorum, Sallinen distorts and exaggerates his figures not to mock but to lay bare the psychological force of religious ecstasy. The palette and brushwork carry the raw energy characteristic of expressionism — forms pushed to the edge of abstraction, color wielded as emotional temperature rather than faithful description.