The architecture of the museum also follows the logic of the Estonian absurd: as it can be, so it must be. The building’s oroginal reinforced concrete supports and beams and unplastered brick walls are openly exposed, and tall, narrow glass windows have been cut between them, filling the gallery with a church-like atmosphere, especially since through them, the view of the sea alternates with the paintings hanging between them.
Next to the refrigeratory, two former water towers have also been set up in the garden, where temporary exhibitions are held.
“Is my press card valid here?” I ask. This card is only valid in state museums, but nobody forbids you to try. “Well, if you write about us, then yes,” the local fisher woman sitting at the cashier replies. “How do I know if I’m going to write if I have not seen it yet?” “Okay, here’s a free ticket, but then do write.”
The paintings on display do not follow a chronological order, thus avoiding the appearance of trying to represent the entire national art, like the (rival) KUMU, the Tallinn Art Museum does, although the paintings are all first-rate works by the most famous Estonian painters. (“Visitors say it’s better than KUMU,” the fisher woman notes with satisfaction.) Instead, they are grouped by themes, like in the Renaissance Kunstkammers, which is fitting for a private collection: sea, idyll and hard times, myths, nudes and persons, the tribune (social criticism) and fantasy landscapes. Yet, since these themes were the focus of different eras, moving through them also provides us a kind of chronological order.
The rooms are loose: what fits in, fits in, while some paintings are squeezed into the anteroom. Other paintings are propped up against the columns and under those hanging on the walls. There will be room for these too. Now you can see them here.
Sea begins with classical modernism and extends to the beginning of social realism. The first pictures clearly show that, just as modern Hungarian painting was transplanted to Nagybánya from the Munich plein air, so modern Estonian and Baltic painting in general emerged from symbolist and surrealist painting – I will write about this separately – which favors the absurd.
Immediately after the sea, the most fundamental theme here, comes a special room of an artist whom the collector obviously holds in high regard. And with a reason: Eduard Wiiralt (1898-1954) was the most virtuoso Estonian graphic artist. He loved the exotic in his travels and in his subjects, as exemplified by his most famous print, the Reclining tiger (1937). His Parisian Estonian patron, fellow painter and intellectual partner, Martin Baeri, also holds a tiger print in his hand in the portrait painted by Wiiralt in the same year. This tiger was further paraphrased sixty years later in the neopop-neosurrealist painter Peter Allik’s Melancholy (1997).
In 1944, fleeing the Red Army, Wiiralt spent a long time in Sweden and toured Lapland, where he was captivated by a different kind of exoticism: the traditional way of life of the Sami people. Since he wrote letters about his experiences to his friends, we know that the Lapp woman and girl depicted in this print were Elli and Astrid.
The Preacher (1932) is a typical allegory of the troubled interwar times. Such obsessed preachers brought destruction to Estonia in the 20th century, sometimes from the East and sometimes from the West.
The Idyll and hard times room looks as if it started with a beautiful Estonian folk song, played increasingly falsely, from the Estonian village festival through the city bar band, the collective farm accordion and the metropolis’ snobbish concert, to the participants of the former festival emigrating abroad, after which only the private idylls of the socialist times remain.
Lepaseree: Põhjatuuled
Myths evokes one of the most important themes of Baltic art, community and private myths, from the Kalevipoeg – the Estonian equivalent of Kalevala – to folk tales and reinterpreted Greek myths.
Nudes and persons begins with Edgar Viies’ typically dreamlike 1965 clinker brick statue of Adam and Eve, who, contrary to tradition and the title of the room, are fully dressed.
The toughest and most contemporary pictures are in the last few rooms, which, under the titles Tribune and fantasyscapes, evoke the hopelessness of socialism and the places of longing.
The exhibition halls end with a kind of chapel, with the usual long “church window” on its “apse” wall, flanked by Peeter Mudist’s Descent from the Cross (1999) and Jüri Arrak’s Our Sign (2003). This Romanesque open-eyed and crowned Christ is a motif well known, if not from Estonia, then from the medieval Scandinavian tradition influencing it. On the side walls are further “holy images”: Olav Maran’s Still life with two plums and an egg (1999), Ilav Malin’s Carnival Mass (1991), an untitled and undated painting by Peeter Mudist with his characteristic gentle, translucent forms, and two particularly absurd paintings by Mall Nukke: How to become Saint Sebastian and How to become Saint Michael (2001).
The most important painter in the collection, who is held most dear by the collector, is also the most absurd one: Jüri Arrak, some of whose paintings we have already seen. But he also has a room of his own in the museum, where his entire studio was moved after his death in 2022. I will have to write about him separately.
Come with us to…
Atlantis
Bestiary
Bohemia+Prague
Books, exhibitions, music, film
Brave old world
Caucasus
Cemeteries
Crimea
Get to know the
Images of the East
Lightwriting
Lwów/Lemberg
Mallorca
Message on the wall
The Museum of Propaganda
Odessa
Paper Museum
Persian letters
The Jewish heritage
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