In April 1960, Ronald created an extraordinary exhibit based on Dante's Divine Comedy at Battle Creek Park in St. Paul, MN. This show was unique and one of the first of its kind to combine art and the environment. It is also one of the only public showings of his work that was documented.
Artist Builds Easter Spectacle Around Dante
6-Foot Paints Depict “Comedy”
By Ross MacKaye
Americans have in the twentieth century come increasingly to think of paintings as rectangular canvases executed for display, one after another, along the walls of museums.
A winding path in a heavily wooded park was used as an exhibition site in April 1960 by a young St. Paul, Minnesota, artist to challenge this assumption. Working with themes suggested by Dante's Divine Comedy, Ronald Finwall sought to convey some of the complex impact of the heroic poem through marrying forty-one six-by-four-foot panels to a hillside touched with the first faint greens of spring.
The paintings themselves, executed in enamel on composition board, are not illustrations, Finwall explains carefully. They are “impressions of certain passages, viewed in terms of the book's general theme" of the soul's ascent to wisdom or salvation.
The exhibition, planned and set up singlehanded by Finwall, did not attract a great deal of notice. But those who came out to Battle Creek Park during the 10-day display received an unusual artistic experience.
Faithful to Dante's own introductory image of the haunted wood, the exhibit path began in a wooded valley in the park where the sun, shining through the branches of still-bare trees, dappled the walkway in mysterious patterns. From there the viewer walked over a little rise and found himself in an area thick with underbrush, the site of the hell paintings. The deep colors of these panels stood out starkly against the grey-browns of the brush; the viewers' path meandered in seemingly aimless fashion, hemmed in on either side by the brush.
Beyond, past a painting suggesting the ultimate hell of Satan himself, the path opened onto the foot of a concavely a curved hillside. Ranged in a gently rising semicircle were more hopeful colors, the panels of purgatory. More widely separated trees permitted increased sunlight to pour down on the panels and pathway. Finally, after making his way up a really steep rise, the viewer found himself on top, out in the open, among the panels of the deep heaven. Here all was light, in the setting and in the whites, yellows and golds of the final paintings.
Behind the impact of the exhibit lay a colossal amount of work and almost single-minded preoccupation on the part of the artist-exhibitor. The idea itself, as Finwall explains it, was one of those things that just grew and grew. Finwall, now 27, was introduced to the Divine Comedy while a student at Hamline University in St. Paul. During military service after graduation he read and re-read the book, pondering its artistic suggestions. Finally in the winter of 1958-59 the blond, soft-spoken artist, now discharged from the army, began experimentally to lay out a few of the panels. Finwall works hard and rapidly. 3y spring there was a stack of forty-one completed Panels in his makeshift studio in the basement of his parents' home.
For a time the project rested there. "I took a few of the paintings out in the backyard and spread them around," Finwall says. "But T never even got to see them all together myself until I put up the exhibit."
That summer, following his usual practice, Finwall stopped most of his artistic activity to go on duty as a lifeguard for the St. Paul park system. He works at that summer to build up finances to carry him--“a bare subsistence level"—through the balance of the year. But in early fall Finwall decided the panels should be shown; he toured every park in the Twin Cities area and eventually came up with what became the exhibit site. The park department gave its Permission for an exhibit. So Finwall spent much of the winter framing, waterproofing, building mounting stanchions. With the advent of warm weather came the long tedious job of actually setting up. He had originally planned the exhibit for Easter and the week following, the time setting of the poem itself, but frozen ground forced a week's delay.
There were some troubles during the exhibit. One Panel was destroyed during a high wind; naked figures in another had to be dressed in paper clothes at the orders of city officials; viewers were rained out several days; vandals were a constant problem. But the exhibit seemed singularly appropriate use of a city park. And, viewed as a whole, it showed the effect of paintings can be given significant new dimension by the careful blending in of a background which itself stimulates the senses.