The Group of Estonian Artists
	Mai Levin

	The Group of Estonian Artists /GEA/, traditionally classified as cubist-constructivists, was officially registered in December 1923 by the Tartu-Võru Court of Common Pleas, but its formation had begun earlier. In February 1923 there was an exhibition of Jaan Vahtra, Eduard Ole, Friedrich Hist and Ardo Sivadi in a little southeastern town of Võru. We can speak about two nuclei of the GEA: that of Tartu-Võru, whose merit lies in the foundation of the group, and that of Tallinn, which made of it an organisation of a more or less certain artistic tendency. The GEA was quite unique in the Estonian art both because of its credo and its relatively long existence.
	The members of the former, southern nucleus were Jaan Vahtra - the first chairman of the group - Eduard Ole, Friedrich Hist, Felix Johannsen-Randel and the sculptor Juhan Raudsepp, who moved in 1925 to Tallinn and served as a connecting link between these two nuclei. The characteristic features of this nucleus were: the Russian education, as Russia and Latvia were the main sources of information and inspiration, radical tendencies, but a rather short period of this radicalism, and a modest capability for analysis or formulation of their artistic position, although Jaan Vahtra wrote articles about art and delivered lectures. Vahtra was one of the Estonian artists who had studied before World War I in the Art School of Riga where the Romans Suta and Erasts Shveiks studied as well. Vahtra also became acquainted with some other members of the future Riga Artists' Group /RAG/ at that time. He continued his studies in St. Petersburg in 1913-1917 at the School of the Imperial Society for Promoting Arts and spent about a year at the Academy under Vassili Shukhajev and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. During the period 1909-1917 the Latvians Niklâvs Strunke, Janis Liepins, Marta Liepina-Skulme, Uga and Oto Skulme studied there as well.
	Ole, Raudsepp, Hist and Johannsen-Randel chose the Art School of Pensa because their teacher at Valga Town School, Alexei Sokolov, was a former pupil of that school. At the same time, 1914-1918, the Riga Art School was evacuated to Pensa and there were quite a number of Latvian artists relocated there: Romans Suta, Jêkabs Kazaks, Valdemârs Tone, Konrâds Ubâns - the artists who formed The Expressionist Group in 1919 and the RAG in 1920. It is difficult to determine to what extent the Estonians were familiar with the Russian avant-garde. The Pensa School was quite conservative, but on the way home the Estonians visited the museums and galleries of Moscow, the collections of S. Shtshukhin and I. Morozov. According to the memoirs of Juhan Raudsepp, they made a stop in St. Petersburg in 1916. The memoirs of Ole and Vahtra leave the impression that they had already developed very avant-garde tendencies by that time. Vahtra affirmed that he admired Picasso, Leger, Kandinsky, Chagall; and he mentioned the exhibition Tramvai V, which contained the works of A. Ekster, V. Tatlin and others that gave him the impetus to move towards cubism and constructivism.
	At that time of stormy innovation the new art was too new to be distinctly analysed and classified. The view of Herwath Walden that expressionism included cubism, futurism and other trends was shared by many, and if not shared it was the expressionism which was practised in reality, as it was dominating and corresponded best to the spirit of the time. So the works of our cubists-constructivists are until 1923 typically expressionistic, despite a tendency towards a slightly cubistic angularity. The series of woodcuts Blanc et noir from 1919-1921 by Vahtra (the title was probably inspired by an exhibition of graphic art, seen in St. Petersburg) is expressionistic and the same can be said about his Self-portrait of 1923, which was displayed at the joint exhibition of Estonian and Latvian cubists. This exhibition, held in Tartu and Tallinn in 1924, proudly named 'the first Baltic international art exhibition'. The Self-portrait recalls Boris Grigoryev, the Russian expressionist of vigorous gestures whom Vahtra had praised in one of his articles.
	In 1925 Vahtra painted In the Studio that belongs to another chapter in his creative work: the new objectivity - art déco, and left the GEA where the Tallinn nucleus had begun to prevail. Vahtra's friend Friedrich Hist was not content with the level at the Pallas Art School in Tartu and went in 1921 via Riga to Dresden with the intent of studying with O. Kokoschka, but failed and returned to Riga. There he met old friends from his time in Pensa, and became enthusiastic about the art of the RAG. Hist was stimulated by the international aspirations of the RAG, and planned to edit the art magazine Laikmets. He also became acquainted with the magazine of purists L'Esprit Nouveau, the title of which he could not properly write. Hist wrote to Vahtra of these new developments and the result was the GEA. The works of Hist have perished for the most part; the preserved few are rather interesting and enable one to follow his evolution from an intuitive geometrisation to a more calculated manner - partly more abstract, partly more in the spirit of new objectivity. Around 1925, post-cubist geometrisation, new objectivity and art deco with its neo-classicist stylisation began to meet in the same work. A characteristic example of these new tendencies may be found in Sunday (1924), by Felix Johannsen-Randel. Randel's works were close to those of Eduard Ole who painted very few pictures in a geometrically generalised, and smooth, bright-coloured manner. Ole's painting The Children was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1925. Both Randel and Ole renounced this particular stylistic orientation in 1926-1927 and were nearly expelled from the GEA.
	Juhan Raudsepp's earlier works in plaster of Paris are similar to Jacques Lipchitz - through Liepina-Skulme as an intermediary. His bronze statue Ancient Warrior (1929) existed in a larger version in wood as well; and reflects the tendency of the sculptors of the newly independent states to heroicise the national past, paid by the sculptors of all the newly independent states. Having moved to Tallinn in 1925, Raudsepp was one of the organisers of the exhibition of Estonian art in Helsinki in 1929, where he worked hand in hand with Märt Laarman, Arnold Akberg and Henrik Olvi. The aforementioned artists were the principal figures of the Tallinn nucleus. They were more or less self-taught, but well educated and knew their Bauhaus, Berlin and Paris. In 1926 Edmond-Arnold Blumenfeldt joined the group. Blumenfeldt had studied in St. Petersburg in 1916-1918, at the School of Moritz Reimann in Berlin in 1920-1922, and belonged to the Novembergruppe with exhibitions at the Salon des Indépendants in 1924 and 1925. He designed theatre sets, and created the so-called Freidimensionale Bühnenplastiken, but painted in a refined and original manner as well. Unfortunately, his best paintings almost entirely perished throughout the course of World War II, excepting Night in Bavaria (1922-23), which was influenced by expressionism, and Toilet (1928-33) - an elegant art déco scene.
	The Tallinn nucleus was consistent and at the same time careful in its self-determination. In the record of their meeting from the 14th of June 1927, we read that 'the strength of the group and its justification lies in the certainty of its tendency, its modern spirit, although it doesn't bind itself with any trend'. We recognise in this reasonable formulation Märt Laarman who was the theorist of the group and its chairman in 1926-1930. He was the editor of the best art editions of the 1920s, i.e. the five issues of the magazine Taie (1928-1929), and the almanac of the group and its main edition, The Book of new Art (1928), which he designed. The Book of New Art was, incidentally, sent to Michel Seuphor and Theo van Doesburg; Doesburg later praised it in a letter sent to H. Olvi. The ideas expressed in the preface of the almanac were constructivist, as was its appearance in black-and-red. Laarman's earlier work has evoked parallels with Lyonel Feininger; it has a primarily expressionistic character. Laarman visited Germany for the first time in 1922; it was probably due to the impact of this voyage that he turned to woodcutting. He also noticed other things there, too; for example the magazine Veshtsh of El Lissitzky- Ilya Ehrenburg that came out in the spring of 1922.
	The GEA was most interested in making international contacts, which was typical of the avant-garde. In 1927 Arnold Akber visited Paris and Berlin and met the chairman of the 'Internationale Vereinigung von Expressionisten, Kubisten, Futuristen und Konstruktivisten', William Warner. The result was that the members of the GEA - Laarman, Akberg, Hist, Blumenfeldt - took part in the 'Grosse Berliner Ausstellung' of 1928 in the department 'Die Abstrakten'. This was the moment when their work became much more or even fully abstract, like Patterns in a circle or in a hexagon (1926), the Frieze, Sketch for a Stained-Glass Window and collages (1927), and lastly The Construction (1928) by Arnold Akberg. Alberg was an excellent painter of a truly international level and one is tempted to say that he was the most constructivistic artist of the group. But Henrik Olvi must also not be forgotten; his wooden 'designs of monuments' from 1925-1926 are relatives to the 'architectons' of Malevitch. Set designs had to remain a modernist episode in the pre-war theatre. The general atmosphere of the epoch, characterised by the 'realistic reaction', did not favour art of this kind. The confusion of various trends, typical of the 1920s - purism, new objectivity, pittura metafisica, and melancholic feeling at the beginning of the 1930s - are splendidly and extremely personally expressed in the painting Sick (1930-1931) of Märt Laarman. The last exhibition of the Group of Estonian Artists took place in 1932, but the group existed until the 15th of November 1940 when all former artistic organisations and groups were dismissed.
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