I’ve been writing a tract on Estonian visual art and nationalism in the inter war years, in the period of the first Estonian Republic (1918-40). Since the bad old days of Fry & Greenberg formalism and the myth that art history only really happened in Western Europe and America, art history has begun to open out areas that were previously very little known indeed. The period I have chosen to write about is particularly fascinating, as it describes twenty years where artists, writers, actors, critics, theatre directors et al had to create a legal framework for a cultural world pretty much from scratch alongside actually continuing to make work and engage with that of others.
In the climate of the 1920s, that meant that practising artists had an awkward choice. Did they confine themselves to Estonian subject matter and themes alone, or did they plant their ideas in the extraordinarily fertile soil of international modernism? The first choice doomed the taker to provincial irrelevance; the second gave rise to the danger that one would lose one’s identity, if pursuing internationalism to its logical conclusion. Estonian culture and literature is littered with characters wrestling with this choice. The novels of the great
Jaan Kross, who died at the end of 2007, often feature characters who take the tragic consequences of refusing to give up their Estonian identity, regardless.
A real life figure facing this impossible Scylla or Charybdis situation was the painter, auto-didact, essayist, book illustrator and language teacher Mart Laarman. Laarman was one of Estonia’s most prolific intellectuals in the inter-war years. Born in Viljandimaa in 1896, he was a language teacher for much of his professional life, only spending what spare time he had on art. The Estonian capacity for work is extraordinary- twenty first century Estonians, too, each seem to have about three jobs at any one time, and very little time off.
Laarman had contacts with the avant-gardes of Latvia, revolutionary Russia and Germany by 1922, making him, alongside Ado Vabbe, the best connected artist of his time. He travelled extensively in the early 1920s, to Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. At this stage he was much influenced by Kandinsky and the ideas of the
Bauhaus; although he never actually went to France or Holland, as far as I can tell, the inspiration for Laarman was to be found in the Purist ideas of
L’Esprit Nouveau and the sheer undiluted utopianism of Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian in
De Stijl.
The interesting thing about Laarman was that he adopted the Stephen Daedalus gambit on national identity:
“You speak to me of language, nationality, religion…I shall try to fly by those nets” (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Unlike many of his fellow artists, Laarman was little interested in trying to develop a “national school” of Estonian art and seemed to realise that it was futile to try and impose an arbitary set of subjects and styles on something as impossible to define as the question of what defines one nation against another.
His solution was to largely ignore the “national question” altogether, in favour of trying to engage with international modernism on equal terms. Modernism in its purest sense was rootless, urban and idealistic, in direct contrast to “national” art’s rootedness in a specific (largely rural or semi-rural) stereotypical “reality”.
The results were, particularly in the instances of his book illustration, captivating.
Oddly, for someone who eschewed the endless inspection of one’s vital orifice that comprises much “national” art, his most famous painting, below, illustrates two of Tallinn’s defining landmarks:
KUMU, Tallinn
It’s hard to imagine an image being more “Estonian” than one featuring the Olaviste and Niguliste spires, even if the rest of the image owes a great deal to Laarman’s interest in French Purism and the search for a perfect geometry of modernity. There are other images, too, of contemporary Tallinn, a city undergoing profound modernising change on the decade after independence.
By the time that this image was painted in 1927, Laarman was chair and leading theoretician of the Eesti Kunstnikkude Rhym (Group of Estonian Artists.) This group had initially appeared in 1923, in Voru in the South-West of Estonia, under the leadership ofJaan Vahtra. Laarman, Anton Akberg, Henrik Olvi and Blumenfeldt were invited to join as the “Northern” wing of the group a year later. Avant-Garde formations are similar to Trot and Anarchist groupuscules in that they rarely exist for long before splitting. Vahtra’s group left in 1925-26, after a disagreement over how “abstract” the work of EKR artists should be. As the southern section of the EKR returned towards a kind of mannered figuration, Laarman’s EKR became the most unapologetic high modernist group in Estonian culture for the remaining years of their existence.
The high water mark was probably marked by the appearance of the EKR manifesto, Uue Kunsti Raamat,(Book of New Art) in 1928, designed and edited by Laarman.
"Uue Kunsti Raamat", 1928
The book, copiously illustrated and stuffed with some typically bombastic pronouncements, is similar to the programmatic claims made by the modernist groups that Laarman so admired. It made its way around Europe and was admired by van Doesburg. It’s publication in the languages of European modernism- German and French- as well as in Estonian, is a clear attempt to try and record a small place in the increasingly crowded factory of modernist cultural production. Between 1928 and 1930, Laarman and his colleagues had work shown in Berlin and Helsinki, and the artist promoted his world view through the pages of the short lived but influential journal Taide.
However this publication, however advanced, did not make the expected impact. It has to be remembered that the audience for utopian modernism in Tallinn was tiny; conservative critical voices wondered what the point was of artists whose work was so little understood. The EKR’s last exhbition was in 1932, by which time further ideological fissures were appearing between the remaining membership. By that stage, effectively, only Laarman and Akberg were left as the still point of a defunct vortex.
The 1930s were a difficult decade for self proclaimed radicals such as Laarman and Akberg. Estonian culture began to look inwards, especially after Konstantin Päts successful coup in March 1934, which ended Estonia’s unstable democratic period and ushered in the “Era of Silence”. Laarman withdrew from the art world at this period, refusing to engage with a newly authoritarian government’s demands that artists be socially useful, and paint Estonian themed pictures that could be commonly understood. He continued to work as a book illustrator, spasmodically, but in a world of Kalevipoeg illustrations and pretty mediocre sunlit Estonian landscapes painted in a post-impressionist style, he had little to say. After the Soviet takeover, the ghostly EKR, which still existed on paper, was wound up in November 1940, as the Soviets disbanded all remaining independent art organisations, and incorporated the estonian cultural world into the all-USSR Union of Artists and Writers.
Colleagues here told me that Laarman became “very, very depressed” during the Soviet occupation. It seems that the roots of his depression lie in the period after 1932, though, well before the Soviet take-over. Laarman mainly worked in small scale illustration after the war, his career subject to the vicissitudes of Stalinist paranoia. From 1951-56 he was expelled from the artist’s union and had some hard years; he was rehabilitated in 1956 and by 1969 had been awarded the title “Most Esteemed Artist of the USSR”. Ten years later he was dead, his modernist period not so much forgotten as written out of his official history, one that has only been recovered by the likes of Mai Levin since 1991. There’s still plenty more room for further analysis, though, of one of Europe’s most genuinely Utopian inter-war modernists- much more than his career has received to date
