by CKR
Tallinn has a new art museum. It’s quite the building, designed by a young Finnish architect, perched above the President’s house, symbolically and physically opening a route from the largely Russian Lasnamäe district to the centers of Tallinn’s cultural and political life.
Estonian art participated in the major European movements. Estonia and Latvia might have even led in the early twentieth-century Art Noveau and Art Deco movements, had not the Russian Revolution and consequent wars for independence intervened. Paintings from that time introduce elements that I haven’t seen elsewhere, or haven’t seen done so well. But I’m quite an amateur in art.
I went first to the fourth floor, where art from the end of World War II to restoration of Estonia’s independence is displayed. The current exhibition is called “Difficult Choices.”
For some reason not at all clear to me, I have always responded deeply emotionally to the loss of freedom and imposition of dictatorship, with nightmares when I was a child. My response to these paintings wasn’t different. I say this because I’m not at all sure that my criticisms go beyond projection of my current concerns about America.
An emotional tone evolves through the paintings in time: horror to disgust to absurdity. These artists continued to see choices, with full knowledge of the consequences of those choices.
Leili Muuga’s 1956 oil painting, “In the Café (Doubters)” [Kohvikus (Kahtlejad)] shows a group who have removed themselves from the outdoor audience for a parade, blurred out the window with a haze of red flags above. The watchers outside, a man and woman, have their backs to us, engrossed in the parade. Curtains partly veil the view from inside. inside the café are all too aware of the parade. A young man, centered in the window, hangs his head in almost physical illness. At the next table, a woman determinedly smokes a cigarette, forcing her gaze toward her angry male companion. An older man, shoulders slumped and cigarette in hand, watches the parade through the curtain. At a table closer to us, back from the windows, another man watches, while his companion, facing us, his face skull-like, is looking for something he knows he won’t find.
Next to “In the Café (Doubters)” is “Protest Song” (Protestilaul), by Valerian Loik, from 1963. It’s much larger, perhaps three meters square, of marchers, two of whom hold red flags. A few are singing. Others’ expressions suggest that they are trying to decide if they should, or if they dare to sing. Red is the predominant hue.
Two 1970 lithographs by Leonhard Lapin depict the absurd in pastels. “Artist II” (Kunstnik II), in shades of pink and green, depicts a gnome painting a frog sitting on a toadstool. His painting is exact. “Bunny’s Kiss” (Jänka Sundlus) is more sinister. An enormous bunny is leaning over a limp Betty-Boop-like figure with a butterfly bow in her hair. The colors are again pastel, with red bunny lips and stripes on her dress.
“Rocky Sea” (Kivine Meri, 1975), an oil painting by Aili Vint, might have been a warning to the Soviets, had they cared to take it. A flat blue sea, so drained of color at the horizon that it almost merges with the sky, shows, in the foreground, rocks beneath its surface. I took a photo on the north shore almost like this painting.
I wondered how openly these paintings were available during the Soviet times. Estonia had some freedoms some of the time during the Soviet occupation, but it’s not clear to me how far those freedoms went. The Soviets were remarkable blind to what they called “the nationalities problem,” though, so they may have ignored the art those nationalities produced.
It would be good of the museum’s curators to make more of this kind of information available, but the museum is new, and they have undoubtedly have been busy with moving the artwork. But it’s a difficult period for the Estonians to deal with too, and the art is not comforting. The books and postcards in the museum shop were of Edward Viiralt’s famous etchings and the saccharine oils of the late nineteenth century. No reproductions were easily available of the works I’ve described. I had hoped I might scan one in for this post.
And I wouldn’t mind having a copy of “In the Café (Doubters)” for myself, although I’m not sure I’d be able to look at it every day.