Editor-in-Chief of art magazine Taide and an active member of SARV / AICA
Jaakko Lintinen (1933-2023). Photograph: Lintinen's family archives
Honorary member of SARV (Finnish Critics’ Association), editor-in-chief and managing secretary of art magazine Taide (”Art”), Jaakko Lintinen has passed away. He died after a long disease on the 26th of February in Helsinki, at the age of 89 years. He was born on the 8th of May, 1933 in Tampere, Finland.
I remember Jaakko Lintinen as a very influential person and a champion of the artworld in Finland from the 1970s to the 1990s. He was very active in art politics, especially in the Finnish Critics’ Association as well as in AICA Finland, the art section of SARV. He was also the vice president of AICA International.
Colleagues talk about Lintinen as a curious, open, and intellectually alert person who loved polemics. The art magazine Taide of his time was a spry, involved, and multi-sided base for art and philosophical discussions, one of the leading cultural magazines of pre-millennium Finland.
This was especially the case in the 1990s, when Lintinen was the first journalist as the editor-in-chief of Taide in 1990–1995. Until his period, only artists had been editors-in-chief, and Lintinen worked with them as a strong managing secretary during a long and fruitful period. He had a talent for working in teams to activate others and to bring their journalistic ideas for the best of the magazine and for the discourse.
As a hard-working international operator, Lintinen has had a strong relationship with his colleagues in Finland, even widely outside it.
Lintinen was a leading member in the team to plan the AICA Congress in Helsinki and Tampere in 1983. It demanded a lot of meetings and lobbying among the colleagues in AICA International (especially between those in other Nordic AICA sections as well as in AICA Committees) until the Congress was approved by the AICA board and general assembly members.
One of the main themes of the Congress was ”Art-information: a bridge or a barricade between cultures?” The Congress at the end of May, 1983 was organized at the same time with the Congress of IAA (International Artists’ Association) in Helsinki. The two congresses had common programs, as well.
The art magazine Taide presented the themes of the Congress and published some of the lectures, like those of the American critic of Norwegian background, Peter Scheldahl, a critic of the contemporary Nordic art scene and of similar trans-avant-garde ideas of the Italian critic Achille Bonito Oliva, who also received a great deal of criticism from the Congress participants.
One of the art historical events of the AICA Congress in Helsinki was a performance by the Finnish artist Roi Vaara as the White Man, who took the stage with lecturer Hermann Raum from GDR (DDR), to read his twenty-page paper. As White Man sat down at the table, where Lintinen was as well, Raum finished at once in the middle of his long reading and disappeared from the hall.
Jaakko Lintinen was awarded several times throughout his career, such as the E.J. Vehmas Prize and the Edvard Richter Prize, for his work as an art critic with a background in journalism.
Before art magazine Taide, Lintinen had started his career in the 1960s in magazine media and in Design Forum Finland. He received his MA at the University of Helsinki in 1965.