Neue Sachlichkeit in Estonian art
	Mai Levin

	In June-July 1928, three Estonian artists had an exhibition in Tallinn: painters Adamson-Eric and Kristjan Teder, and the graphic artist Eduard Wiiralt. All three were either continuing their training in Paris or were still living there. They had already had a joint exhibition in May at the Blomquist gallery in Oslo. In 1924, Adamson-Eric had left the Charlottenburg art and crafts school in Berlin and moved to Paris; Eduard Wiiralt lived there from autumn 1925, and between 1926 and 1928 Teder studied there. From the mid-1920s onwards a number of Estonian artists lived in Paris, for longer or shorter periods of time depending upon their circumstances. Having studied with such artists as Charles Guerin, Roger Bissière, Moise Kisling, and André Lhote, Adamson-Eric soon moved over to the private academy run by the Russian Vassili Shuhhayev. In the light of the 1925 international exhibition of industrial and decorative art, he felt inclined towards a strong, stylistically determined school of drawing. Other Estonians joined him there, including Arnold Kalmus, Aleksander Vardi and Kristjan Teder. Shuhhayev, together with his friend Aleksander Jakovlev, represented the neo-classicist manner already apparent in the pre-First World War Russian art, which included characteristic features of the 1920s style - neue Sachlichkeit and art déco.
	In a review of the 1928 exhibition, art critic Hanno Kompus detected in the paintings of Adamson-Eric and Kristjan Teder, "a tendency that turns away from lyrical subjectivism/expressionism in order to conquer the world of reality/die neue Sachlichkeit." "The painting of topics, rejected ever since expressionism, is returning,"_ he argued, describing another, even newer tendency revealed in Adamson-Eric's still lifes. In his paintings - full of every imaginable kind of broken, dusty old stuff and various banal items - those that followed an exhibition of 1928 became known as 'dustbin poetry'. The artist's focus started to shift from 'topic painting' to the purely picturesque, the problems of colouring, chiaroscuro and texture, in the spirit of the French school. This was the period when Estonian art was moving from the sphere of German influence to that of the French.
	Die neue Sachlichkeit, having emerged in German art from 1910 to 1920 (although only gaining its epithet in 1923 courtesy of Gustav Hartlaub), was in a certain sense a derivative of expressionism. Its socially as well as formally more radical wing - verism - could be called the expressionism of the era shaken by war and revolutions, embittered by the destructiveness and corruption of people, and by shattered illusions. It is therefore natural that its earlier manifestations in Estonian art were fitted into the notion of 'expressionism'. Just like the expressionism of the late 1910s, die neue Sachlichkeit, too, seeped into Estonia from German literature, travel and personal contact. The Pallas art school was founded in Tartu in 1919. Head of the sculpture department, Anton Starkopf, had studied in Germany between 1911 and 1912 and again from 1914 to 1918. His circle of acquaintances included Otto Dix, one of the most prominent representatives of neue Sachlichkeit in painting and graphic art. According to Aleksander Vardi, Dix was one of the idols of young Estonian artists in the early 1920s. His work had an impact on Eduard Wiiralt, who began as a student of sculpture at Pallas before specialised in graphic art. Georg Kind, who came from Dresden in 1921 to teach graphic art, helped Wiiralt to further his skills in sculpture at the Dresden Academy of art, and also supplemented his knowledge in graphic techniques.
	Wiiralt was one of the earliest followers of neue Sachlichkeit in Estonian art. This cannot be merely ascribed to outside influences. He was an exceptionally skilled draftsman, forever drawing from nature. His depictions of every conceivable type of person were often transformed into grotesque caricatures. Grotesque and parody, typical of neue Sachlichkeit, came naturally to him. German and Estonian life alike afforded ample material to such an artist. Wiiralt was actually the one who introduced Tartu slums to Estonian art, with their dilapidated wooden houses, market stalls, barge owners and pubs. The latter theme rapidly became popular in the early 1920s. These include, among many other works, Wiiralt's Teahouse Jakori (1922, etching, aquatint), Arkadio Laigo's painting In the Pub (1922, oil) and Peet Aren's Village Pub (1923, destroyed).
	The Tartu milieu, irrespective of its diversity and picturesqueness, was not nearly so remarkable as that of Dresden in 1922-1923 at the time when Wiiralt lived there. Social contrasts, rife prostitution and the rhythm of life of the metropolis, inspired him to produce works like In a Canteen (1922, etching), In a Brothel (1922, aquatint), Hunger (1922, dry point), Late Stranger (1923, dry point, copper engraving) and so on. Through these works Estonian art was most directly and powerfully associated with verism. After returning to Tartu, and in his early days in Paris, the veristic pathos in his work diminished, giving way to a calmer, more descriptive neue-Sachlichkeit version, a style that, from the mid-1920s onwards became synonymous with art déco. This modification became the most widely disseminated version of neue Sachlichkeit, involving, to a greater or lesser extent, almost every significant artist, including members of the Estonian Group of Artists (founded in 1923) with its cubist-constructivist orientation. Eduard Ole and Felix Randel, for instance, experienced a relatively brief geometric period. Between 1926 and 1927 both fully adopted the neue Sachlichkeit manner, nuances of which were already present in their earlier works. With his paintings, watercolours and gouache drawings, which so lightly and elegantly treat the topics of modern urban life, Eduard Ole is an excellent representative of the aforementioned blending of neue Sachlichkeit and art dòco. His manner resembles the Japanese artist Tsougouharu Foujita who was quite popular in Paris at that time. Johannes Greenberg's paintings of the early 1930s depicting emphatically wholesome, sensuously languid female nudes seem, in their turn, to parallel the fashionable types of Tamara Lempicka, the favourite painter of high society at that time. Lydia Mei-Starkopf's masterful water colour still lifes and Arkadio Laigo's still lifes and oil painting compositions include elements of both styles.
	In Laigo's early work during the second half of the 1920s and early 1930s, the naivistic trend in neue Sachlichkeit prevails. This had been intimated even earlier in such paintings as Laigo's Farm (1923, EMA) and Juhan Muks's Mother (1923, EMA). Moreover, the geometrising generalisation of form also brings them closer to the aspirations of the Estonian Group of Artists. Such a naivistic approach that infused Estonian art, combined with neue Sachlichkeit, helped many a struggling artist to find him or herself. This was the case with Larin Luts who, at her graduation from Pallas, produced such extraordinary works as Island of Happiness (1928, EMA), Gardener (1928, TAM) and Killing Innocent Children (1928, EMA).
	There is plenty of scope for the theme of 'refined naiveté' in Estonian art, including the work of Wiiralt. He is one of the few to whom the truly mystical 'magical realism' can be applied. Estonian artists probably lacked a necessary predisposition for the strange and mysterious espoused by the branch of neue Sachlichkeit in German art represented by the likes of Georg Schrimpf. Hence the fact that surrealism, too, touched but few Estonian artists, except Adamson-Eric and Wiiralt, the imagination of the latter flaring-up magnificently in the 1930s to produce a masterpiece like Hell (1930-1932, etching, copper engraving). The period of neue Sachlichkeit in Estonian art is fairly long. This is illustrated by the work of a number of artists: Natalie Mei, for example, whose earlier associated work dates back to 1921, was followed by witty collages of grotesque characters up to the early 1930s. Between 1928 and 1929 she produced a series of typically neue Sachlichkeit pencil drawings that depict the purposelessness of everyday life. The economic crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s provided neue Sachlichkeit with plentiful new material, and revived the veristic tones. This could more accurately be called prose realism, situated as it was between the earlier neue Sachlichkeit and poetic realism that flourished in the mid-1930s. This kind of occasionally rather coarse realism characterised the earlier work of many artists who studied at the Pallas art school at the time. The more talented of them, including Andrus Johani and Hando Mugasto, were fascinated by the vividness of, and warm sympathy for, the hardships of the poor.
	In sculpture, Ferdi Sannamees's predominately realistic portraits had a sensitivity for changes in fashion. Neue Sachlichkeit's crispness is evident in the sportsman of the Baltic German artist Constance Wetter-Rosenthal's Towards the Goal (1925, bronze, EMA). Sport was a central topic in art of the 1920s. Reverberations of neue Sachlichkeit can be perceived in the detailed realism of Aleksander Eller's reliefs dating from the second half of the 1930s. It is incorrect to expand the traits of whatever trend (including neue Sachlichkeit) too far and wide. The 20th century saw the emergence of many new art phenomena, existing side by side and blending in the work of single artists. Such 'impurity' is inherent in the emergence of any artistic style or movement. In the case of Estonian artists who absorbed various different influences, often simultaneously, it is almost impossible to isolate just one. Nevertheless, whether 'pure' or otherwise, neue Sachlichkeit seems to have been a phenomenon that considerably determined the character of Estonian art throughout the 1920s.
	| Estonian Art 2/00 (8) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2000 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |