Maria Prymachenko and Finnish airplanes

World known Finnish company Marimekko that produces household items (from textiles to tableware and clothing) was caught in plagiarism. Company’s designer Kristina Isola created an image very similar to the artwork of Ukrainian Artist Maria Prymachenko. Isola presented “her” work in 2007 but the plagiarism was revealed last week thanks to the reporters of an authoritative newspaper Helsingin Sanomat.

Prymachenko’s artwork is called Rat on the Road. It depicts an animal traveling in a forest that pulls its babies on a sleigh. Print of the Finnish designer only has a different name Forest Dwellers and depicts only the trees without the rat. Kristina Isola has already apologized for the incident. Finnish portal yle.fi quoted her statement: “I didn’t think of copyright or the fact that I appropriated someone else’s work. I felt that the Forest Dwellers was so intimate that I wanted to share this feeling to a forest with as many people as possible.” At the same time Isola added that she understands that she did a wrong thing: “I am sorry and ashamed of what I did.”

The scandal gained greater scale because of the fact that Finnish airline FinnAir in cooperation with Marimekko printed this image on their Airbuses 330 flying to New York and the Far East. The airline management refused to comment on the incident, citing the fact that Marimekko has already commented on it. At the same time, Helsingin Sanomat published a written statement of the creative director of Marimekko Minna Kemell-Kutvonen: “The fact that another artist’s work has been used as the basis for the Forest Dwellers pattern comes as a complete shock and a deep disappointment to us.” According to her, the company stands for trust in all its authors and their ideas.

However, this negative situation with Marimekko company opened Ukrainian artist Maria Prymachenko to the rest of the world. Right after the scandal erupted, a page about Maria Prymachenko appeared on Wikipedia in Finnish because the scandal has created great interest in the Ukrainian artist among the Finns. “Unfortunatelly, I knew nothing abut Maria Prymachenko before. And here is such a great layer of information. Will have something to read,” wrote one of the Internet users.

The Day was able to talk to a journalist of Helsingin Sanomat, the author of the material on plagiarism, Kristiina Markkanen and ask her about the story and about how she discovered that the copyright for this print belongs to Maria Prymachenko.

“A reader of our newspaper saw this print in one of my articles which dealt with the design of aircrafts. One of the photos depicted a Finnish aircraft en route to New York and Asia. The FinnAir aircraft had the same print on it. Our reader – either he or she (I can’t say who because that person wished to remain unnamed) remembered that there was a book in their family library called Ukrainian Folk Art. It was published in Kyiv in 1967, when Ukraine was still a part of the Soviet Union. When this person saw the similarity in images, s/he contacted me. This person made photos of images from this book and sent them to me. Later I contacted that person and said that I wanted to see the book and find out where that person got it. The reader told me that s/he does not want to attract attention, but just wanted to tell about the artwork of Maria Prymachenko. The goal of this person was to reveal untrue actions of Marimekko and draw attention to Prymachenko, which she really deserves, because she is the real author of this image.”

What is the situation around Marimekko now? How has this scandal affected their reputation?

“Marimekko is a powerful company in Finland. And the scandal was huge! I can’t say how Marimekko will survive this scandal, however, they were very confused when the information surfaced. People from Japan visit the website of our newspaper to read the story and to see how these images look like because many people in Japan know about Marimekko.”

How people reacted to your publication exposing the Marimekko Company?

“People were very surprised and disappointed at the same time. We have not had anything like this before. People wanted to know more about the situation and traffic to our website has increased considerably. It means that Marimekko is very important for people. However, when the truth of the plagiarism became obvious, people became suspicious of whether similar stories could’ve happened to Marimekko in the past. As you know, the relationship between decorative art, hand-made and the copyright was quite different in the 1960s and 1970s. But, importantly, the holder of the copyright for this print made for Marimekko in 2007 is designer’s mother [Maija Isola. – Ed.] who also worked for Marimekko. But people understand that Kristina Isola did something bad. In general, the Finnish audience is very enthusiastic about the image of Maria Prymachenko. They search for her other images on the Internet. Some even said that Marimekko should contact the family of Maria Prymachenko and make several products with her images printed on them with the permission of Prymachenko’s relatives because her images are beautiful and people here are very interested in Prymachenko’s artwork. By the way, I also noticed that Finnish Wikipedia added a page dedicated to Maria Prymachenko.”

TO THE POINT

Recently, on a popular website about folk art “Rukotvory” and its Facebook page a petition was published in both Ukrainian and English titled “Please leave the fairytale trees by Maria Prymachenko on FinnAir airplanes!” The initiator of the petition, one of the founders and developers of the “Rukotvory” website, journalist Bohdan Hdal told The Day that already 700 people have signed the petition to keep the drawing of the Ukrainian artist on FinnAir airplanes with Prymachenko’s name signed on them. “We sent the link to a petition to several English publications and FinnAir on their Facebook page,” Hdal told The Day. “Despite the fact that Ukrainian society is not a party to the conflict, I have a desire to make it possible that good things would please the eyes of many people. If such things have been already implemented, why can’t they continue to live? This situation will be beneficial to everyone. For Marimekko it will be a good reason to be more attentive to their work. And Maria Prymachenko will sure just benefit from it. This whole story was necessary to make the world discover this great artist, who is unfairly not well known in the world, in a new way. Through her art people may find out more about Ukrainian traditional folk art,” added Hdal.