Museum in the fish factory. The Viinistu Estonian Art Museum

The Estonian absurd does not stop at naive artists and everyday life, but also permeates high art.

It is absurd in itself that Estonia’s best – well, let it be second best – art gallery is located an hour from the capital, on a peninsula jutting deep into the Gulf of Finland, in a small fishing village, in the refrigeratory of a former socialist fishing collective. The Viinistu Art Museum was founded by Jaan Manitski, ABBA’s financial manager, who was evacuated to Sweden by his parents at the age of one from the approaching Red Army. But he did not forget about his homeland. In 2002, he opened his collection of nearly 500 paintings, acquired from the best modern Estonian artists, to the public not in his private palace in Stockholm or Tallinn, but in his native village.

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.

Peet Aren: Red sails, 1923

August Jansen: Muhu Island women, 1920

Boris Ottenberg: The northern shores of Norvegia, 1940-44

Karl Aleksander von Winkler: View of Naples, 1902-04

Julie-Wilhelmine Hagen-Schwarz: Käsmu beach, 1880s

Henn-Olavi Roode: Sea, 1962

Aleksander Krims-Radava: Rocky beach with boat harbor, 1930-40s

Heldur Viires: Fishing collective, 1959

Raimo Saare: Harbor, 1961

Kristiina Kaasik: Shore, 1979

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

Elmar Kits: Village festival, 1941

Richard Kaljo: Quartet, 1965

Endel Kõks: Orchestra, 1941

Henn-Olavi Roode: People’s entertainers, 1959/60

Olga Terri: Concert, 1961

Eerik Haamer: The exiles, 1945

Valdur Ohakas: Embracing, 1963

Aants Viidalepp: Cyclists, 1989

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.

Evald Okas: Kalevipoeg’s fight against the devils of hell

Jaak Soans: Model for Jakob Hurt’s monument, 1993. The Lutheran theologian and ethnographer Jakob Hurt (1839-1907) was a key figure in the Estonian national revival

Enn Põldroos: Europe with the bull, 1999

Priit Pajos: Unicorn tamer, 2001

Jüri Arrak: Temple, 1987

Jüri Arrak: Sleep, 1995

Urmas Viik: Africa’s stones, 2000

Krista Simson: Fang, 2000

Aants Viidalepp: Fairy tale illustrations, 1955

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.

Endel Kõks: Two women, 1954

Nikolai Kormašov: Nude, s.d.

Johannes Uiga: Nude, 1987

Valdur Ohakas: Woman with fish, 1961

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.

Eduard Kutsar: Self-portrait, 1950s

Olav Maran: Before decision (Ott Arder’s portrait), 1977

Eerik Haamer: Skier, 1931-34

Miljard Kilk: Friends (Let’s Go II), 2007

Aarne Miikmaa: Winter landscape, 1930

Valerian Loik: From the studio window, 1968

Nikolai Kull: Winter Tallinn, 1939

Herman Talvik: Landscape in Lapponia, 1966

Paul Liivak: Farm on a rocky coast, 1930s

Jaan Koort: Cityscape, 1910s

Mari Roosvalt: Autumnal, 1978

Lemming Nagel: Incident, 2000

Ilmar Malin: Mountain tower, 1989

Miljard Kilk: Kings, 2001

Konrad Mägi: Vilsandi motif, 1913-14

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.

The Estonian absurd

Unlike Latvians, who share their smiles sparingly, Estonians really like absurd humor.

After crossing the Latvian-Estonian border, a crowd of strange creatures make you stop at the edge of the village of Lilli. The various gnomes, dwarfs and ghosts were probably driven across the border by rational Latvian thinking, and then they had a rest on the edge of the first garden, sniffing lung-expanding portions from the magical-absurd Estonian air. You can see here forest and water elves, banana monsters and walking demons, one of which even carries a witch’s house on its head. Even a child’s little plastic motorbike has been incorporated into one of the figures, molded from concrete and then painted. This is the first show we enjoy of unbridled Estonian imagination and creativity.

Arriving in the small town of Viljandi, we see cats everywhere on the side of the road. They are also made of concrete, and their purpose is both to increase the fun and to prevent unwanted parking.

Following the cats, we reach the pride of Viljandi, the Museum of Naive Painters. It was actually the residence and studio of only one local naive painter, Paul Kondas (1900-1985). The latter has been preserved furnished, with his paintings on the walls. In the middle of them, facing the entrance, hangs his self-portrait, which is so similar to Ceaușescu that I suggested on FB that perhaps the Conducător did not die, but hid here after the fall of his regime as an Estonian naive folk painter. But I overestimated my readers, many of whom took the suggestion seriously, so I will not push it any forward here.

In addition to local Estonian myths, Kondas was interested in several other mythical and absurd topics, especially space travel and demons.

If you look at the pictures alone, you can see in them the evidence of the private mythology of a depraved mind. But the situation is more complicated than that. The nurses – I mean the young ladies in charge of the museum – turn on a ten-minute film in which a friend of Kondas analyzes his most important paintings. The analyst is also a phenomenon, with a funny goatee, a flattering voice in which he convincingly spouts the most absurd things, while, next to the analyzed pictures, we also see him sometimes dressed in cheerful colorful shirts, standing in the doorways of Estonian wooden huts, with palm trees made of paper on either side. These ten minutes convince us that we were wrong. The museum is the product of the private mythology of two depraved minds, one of whom, through his qualifications and professional jargon, managed to convince the local authorities that the other was a great artist to be taken seriously, and the whole of Viljandi has been saying so ever since.

The film is only in Estonian, and although my Finno-Ugric mother tongue of course immediately enables me to understand it, nevertheless the few-page English excerpt that the nurses give us before the film is of a great help in understanding the subtleties. I will quote a few sentences from it to each image.

Strawberry Eaters (1965) “Fifteen years after completing the painting, Kondas felt that the strawberry eaters’ eyes had been executed in a very «primitive technique» and needed urgent repair. As a result, the men’s and women’s eyes became maddened, ideally suited to reflect the fears of marriage.”

In Taara’s Holy Grove (1957) “The topic of Kondas and religion is a fascinating one. It can be said that he did not like anything ready-made and did not believe in the church as an institution. This painting was displayed with two other works by Kondas in the Viljandi Museum in 1960. The local newspaper Tee Kommunismile (Road to Communism) published a review which said: «Unfortunately, there were some works at the exhibition, which had been copied from old-fashioned picture postcards». The artist was deeply insulted by the comment, and this remained the only time in Kondas’ lifetime that his works were publicly displayed in his home town.”

Life (1960) “Clearly recognisable in the painting conducting the funeral service is Georg Rosenberg, the pastor of Suure-Jaani, with whom Kondas did not have a good relationship.”

U.N.! (1960) “This painting acknowledges the perennial problem of inherent animosity between the members of the United Nations. In the painting, the so-called primitive peoples are fighting against the world’s most prosperous countries. Kondas managed to turn the theme of pointless warfare exhausting the globe into grotesque.”

The Encounter (1966) “This painting is an irony of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s maize cultivation policy. Kondas painted the maize people, or Russians, on an impossible mission on the Moon. It soon becomes clear that maize does not grow on the Moon. As a result, they are weak from hunger and apparently have also eaten their clothes. Fortunately, a US space rocket lands on the Moon, and the Russians greet them as lifesavers.

Santa Claus fishing (1981) “This is Paul Kondas’ last autobiographical work summarising his life and work. Santa Claus was one of the few positive characters to him, a ritual figure associated with expectation and sharing. He does not expect much, does his job and leaves, but hopefully returns next year.”

Thanks to the effective laudation, not only did Kondas’ studio survive, but the rest of the premises are also used as exhibition halls for the works of other naive artists – painters, concrete sculptores, concept artists, trash house builders and others –, a perfect illustration of “one fool makes many”.

But Estonian humor does not end with the museum. Entering the neighboring café, we see a multitude of coffee mugs on the wall by local artist Raivo Loit which directly continue the psychedelic line of Kondas.

And when leaving the café, a group of half-naked street warriors with sculpted bodies march past us in a tough, patriotic manner. The grotesque thing is that many of them use crutches or wheelchairs. The town’s water tower floats above them like a house on duck legs.

As I write this in the garden suburb of Tartu, in the former Jewish quarter, looking out the window of a hundred-year-old wooden house, I see a burly man of about eighty years coming shuffling down the street in a pair of underpants, holding a Coop bag full of goods in his hand. While I think about how he went to the Coop in a mere pair of underpants, walked through the supermarket, sorted the goods and put them in his basket, paid at the cash, and everyone took this for normal, I see him again shuffling back, now with an empty Coop bag.

It’s not exactly precise to say that Estonians love absurd humor. In Estonia, absurd is the clef of life, and even a foreigner will learn to read life in this clef in a day or two.

I would like to read an Estonian art history handbook. I am sure that Bosch’s paintings are classified as realism.