On May 8, 2014, the New York Times (
visit link) reported the following story:
"In Estonia, Modern Art’s Northern Fringe Goes on Display
By PALKO KARASZMAY 8, 2014
TALLINN, Estonia — In the aftermath of World War I, the social, political and artistic upheaval that prevailed in Europe could be felt even in the Continent’s farthest reaches. So while Berlin and Paris became prominent centers of Modernism, artists elsewhere, including in Northern Europe, also sought to make their mark on the new era.
The exhibition “Electromagnetic: Modern Art in Northern Europe, 1918-1931” at the Kumu Art Museum in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, shows selected works by such artists. Focusing on their inspiration, travels and originality, the exhibition is a rare display of creativity and mutual influence in Scandinavia and the Baltic states from a time when collaboration across borders was not taken for granted. The show, which originated last fall at the Henie-Onstad Art Center, south of Oslo, is on view in Tallinn through May 18.
Historically, surveys of 20th-century art and European Modernism have largely overlooked the role of regions like Northern and Eastern Europe. “All the Nordic countries have the same problem as we do: We are not Paris,” said Sirje Helme, director of the Kumu Museum, which has focused on art from this period in recent exhibitions.
The Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn, Estonia. Art historians are beginning to recognize the role of Northern and Eastern Europe in the development of modern art. Credit Palko Karasz
“The main question is: What is the position of our art, Estonian art? Not only today, but through the 20th century,” Ms. Helme said.
An opening salvo comes in the form of an experimental film that shows the multidisciplinary approach to fine art in the 1920s. “Symphonie Diagonale” (1924) is a silent symphony of geometric forms that its Swedish creator, Viking Eggeling, conceived as a combination of drawing and musical rhythms.
Nearby, “Ballet Mécanique” (1924), by the French painter Fernand Léger, who was a mentor to many of the artists featured in the exhibition, attempts to create abstract movement on film with an accumulation of close-ups of everyday life.
The exhibition includes more than a hundred works from two dozen international lenders, featuring artists from Northern Europe such as Otto G. Carlsund, Mart Laarman and Gustav Klutsis. The exhibition reflects “creativity across the board, in all disciplines,” Gladys C. Fabre, the curator of the exhibition, said in an email from Brussels, where she lives and works.
Works from artists who influenced Northern Europeans, including Léger, André Lhote and Amédée Ozenfant, are shown beside works of their followers.
“Electromagnetic,” the title of the exhibition, comes from a poem in “Panama, or the Adventures of My Seven Uncles,” by the Swiss-born French poet Blaise Cendrars: “Electro-magnetic/Levels/In the fjords of the Land of Fire/On the fringes of the world”…
Cendrars’s works with Léger and the Paris-based Ballets Suédois dance company brought him into some of the circles in which the Nordic artists worked.
“This poet, nomad par excellence, perfectly expresses the new spirit, dynamism, modern rhythms, praise of the machine and the lure of all disciplines,” Ms. Fabre said of Cendrars.
Travel is a central theme of Cendrars’s poem and is omnipresent at the Tallinn exhibition, both as a theme portrayed in individual works and in the cultural movements the artists encountered in Western Europe.
German Expressionism can be seen in Jaan Vahtra’s “Self-Portrait,” the artist pictured with severe traits, standing in the shade of buildings; Cubism is evident in Edmond Arnold Blumenfeldt’s “Night in Bavaria,” and New Objectivity is in Eduard Ole’s “Table.”
These Estonian artists, many of whom were introduced to West European art through black and white reproductions in magazines, traveled to experience the artistic melting pot in the Continent’s cosmopolitan capitals. Their travels led to Berlin, in pursuit of Expressionism, Dada and Bauhaus. Others preferred Paris and its aura of liberty, the academies and the influence of Picasso, Mondrian or van Doesburg.
The exhibition explores a time of zeal and experimentation. Amid a flourish of artistic activity, factions and circles formed and split up and manifestos and gatherings multiplied. But for Ms. Fabre, the curator, the originality of Nordic artists came in their pursuit of an autonomous form of art, one that took from surrounding movements but that also rejected them.
For some, abstraction was purely philosophical, while others, like the Latvian painter Gustav Klutsis, gave it a practical, social dimension. Moving against the westward tide, Klutsis turned toward the Russian Constructivism of St. Petersburg and Moscow. He became an outspoken partisan of the Soviet Union, as shown in his 1927 poster design, “On the Front of Socialist Construction.”
Followers of the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg and his “Concrete Art” manifesto believed in the total autonomy of art, emancipated from references to the outside world. “A pictorial element has no other meaning than what it represents; consequently, the painting possesses no other meaning than what it is by itself,” the manifesto proclaimed.
Some artists continued the pursuit of internationalist ideals even while at home. In 1923, the Group of Estonian Artists was formed as a gathering of self-taught creators. “They wanted to make something else, something that is in dialogue with Russian Cubo Futurism on the one side and Constructivism on the other,” said Liis Pahlapuu, coordinator of the exhibition on behalf of Kumu.
One of the leading figures of this group was Mart Laarman. He focused on universal objects, humans and space, freed from their ethnic context. “Illness,” with a mannequin-like faceless character as its central subject, shows his tendency toward a universal idea of humanity. “St. Olaf’s Church and St. Nicholas’ Church in Tallinn” is a metaphysical look at architecture, placing iconic buildings of the city’s old town in a sterile, geometrical space.
For many of these artists, however, the return home meant facing a hostile public, disappointment and criticism. The Latvian painter Romans Suta, for example, was accused in a local periodical of merely copying Le Corbusier. As a result, many turned to decorative and applied art, more accessible to the public.
In the Baltic states, the end of Russian rule in 1918 was a motivation to promote a distinct cultural identity. Folkloric motives were not uncommon., like on Suta’s decorative plate called “Wedding,” from 1928. The tendency to reflect national identity only grew stronger with the rise of nationalism in the 1930s.
But whether abroad or at home, Nordic artists left a lasting mark on European Modernism. In 1927, Léger praised the work of the Swedish painter Otto G. Carlsund in the catalog of his first solo exhibition in Paris: “He is representative of a new Scandinavian spirit, comprised of order and measure, devoid of all sentimental and decorative romanticism,” Léger wrote. “Over those muddy and transitory periods,” he said of Renaissance art and Impressionism, “a bridge has been built. On it we will dance for a long time.'”