Maija Sofia Isola (15 March 1927 – 3 March 2001) was a Finnish designer of printed textiles, and the creator of over 500 patterns, including Unikko ("Poppy"). The bold, colourful prints she created as the head designer of Marimekko made the Finnish company famous in the 1960s. She also had a successful career as a visual artist.
Isola exhibited across Europe, including at the Brussels World Fair and the Milan Triennale, and in the USA. Retrospectives of her work have been held at the Design Museum in Helsinki, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Design Museum, Copenhagen, the Slovene Ethnographic Museum, Ljubljana, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Products featuring her prints are still being sold at Marimekko.
She lived and worked in Finland for most of her life in, but spent some years in France, Algeria and the United States. She was married three times. Her daughter, Kristina Isola, also became a Marimekko designer, collaborating with her mother for some time. Her granddaughter, Emma, also designs for the company.
Biography
Early life
Isola was born to Mauno and Toini Isola, the youngest of their three daughters. Mauno was a farmer who wrote song lyrics, including a popular Finnish Christmas carol. The girls lived on the family farm and helped out with agricultural work in the summer. They made paper dolls with elegant dresses for their homemade paper dollhouse, which had elaborately decorated interiors.
Isola studied painting at the Helsinki Central School of Industrial Arts. In 1945, as the Second World War came to an end, her life changed radically: her father died, and she became pregnant. On 22 July 1945 she married the commercial artist Georg Leander; their daughter Kristina was born in January 1946.
In 1948, she went to Oslo, visiting the Van Gogh exhibition and seeing the Edvard Munch paintings there. She was inspired by a display of classical era pots at the Oslo Museum of Craft and Design to create her Amfora ("Amphora") print. The marriage with Leander did not last long, and by 1949 she was travelling Europe with the painter Jaakko ("Jaska") Somersalo, who became her second husband. He taught her woodcut printing and inspired her to paint. They divorced in 1955.
Marimekko
Her student-era work, including Amfora, was spotted in 1949 by Marimekko's founder, Armi Ratia. Ratia hired Isola to work for Printex, the forerunner of Marimekko. She became the principal textile designer for Marimekko, creating some eight to ten patterns every year.
Between 1957 and 1963, Isola created her first series of works on a single theme, Luonto (Nature). It consisted of some 30 designs, based on pressed plants, which her daughter Kristina had started collecting at age 11. In 1958, she began another series, Ornamentti (Ornament), based on Slavic folk art. It, too, included about 30 designs, and made her famous.
In 1959 she married the judge Jorma Tissari. He was a wealthy art lover with a spacious home in the centre of Helsinki. When Isola wanted more creative freedom from Ratia's control, Tissari negotiated with Marimekko to give her a new contract that allowed her more creative freedom.
The collaboration between Isola and Ratia was an "unusual creative power game" characterised by "vitality and inventiveness" rather than a harmonious understanding. The tone for this was set when, in 1964, Isola "provocatively" defied Ratia's professed hatred of floral patterns by painting the famous Unikko (Poppy) pattern in bold pink, red and black on white; the pattern came to define the brand and has been in production ever since. It was one of some eight floral designs that Ratia chose from Isola's portfolio in that period.
From 1965 to 1967, Isola worked on the theme of sun and sea, creating at least nine designs that were adopted by Marimekko, including Albatrossi (Albatross), Meduusa (Jellyfish), and Osteri (Oyster). Her patterns were, by now, being widely reproduced. To facilitate this process and to keep the patterns accurate, Isola maintained a set of "pattern books". These were handwritten exercise books containing precise details of her pattern repeats. Each one, such as her 1968 Lovelovelove, was drawn to scale on a pattern book page, coloured, and annotated with the names of the colours to be used. The books also recorded the size of the actual repeat and details of print orders. The books continued to be used as production guides in the decades after her death.