Urbanisation and the concomitant rapid changes in society had created the preconditions for the emergence of professional Estonian fine and applied art by the early 20th century. As local German master artisans were often less than pleased to share their trade secrets with their socially inferior co-citizens, Estonians chose to go and study abroad: in St Petersburg, several applied art schools in Germany, etc.

A number of the great names of early Estonian national applied art - e.g. Vanda Juhasoo, Juuli Suits, Alma Koskel, Anni Varma - who started out establishing handicraft courses and schools in the early 20th century, had received their education at the Helsinki Ateneum art school in Finland. In addition to such direct influences, the general inspiration provided by Estonia's kindred nation across the Gulf of Finland whose 'national awakening' had occurred somewhat earlier, was of essential importance.

Inevitably, the existing trade-related and workshop-based instruction was gradually replaced by public applied art schooling: 1914 saw the establishment of the Tallinn Arts and Crafts School that taught leatherwork, bookbinding, decorative painting and sculpture, graphic art and printing, textile art, ceramics, metal and glass art. Re-named the State Arts and Crafts School in 1924, it had soon acquired a central role in the instruction of nearly every field of applied arts practised in or introduced to Estonia.

Along with the establishment of Estonianlanguage university programmes of ethnology and folklore, the 1920s saw the nation-wide encouragement of the National Romanticist style applied art that would rely on 'original Estonian motifs'.

This was accompanied by an unprecedented interest on the part of leading Estonian artists in creating fancy sketches and designs for all areas of (applied) art and handicraft, from furniture design to leatherwork. What is more, they did this without having the slightest worry about their reputation as professional architects, painters or sculptors.

A mark of quality of its own was the handicraft production of the workshop of Eduard Taska - head of the department of bookbinding and leather working at the State Arts and Crafts School - as well as that of the industrial enterprise Taska established by him in 1933.

Estonian applied art as a whole, as well as its teaching, reached a new level in the 1930s. Besides the crafts that had been copying the vanishing original folk art and had borrowed its motifs (the first Estonian union of applied artists of 1928 was called, rather indicatively, Decor), a fully professional 'expressive applied art' emerged, and in 1932 the most influential organisation of the innovators, the Association of Applied Artists (RaKÜ), was founded.

An excellent example of the new wave of applied art with elements of Functionalism and Art Déco is the versatile oeuvre of Adamson-Eric (Erich Karl Hugo Adamson). From the 1920s on, his numerous works in a highly personal style and various fields of applied art - textile, metal and leather art, ceramics - continued to reflect the development in the field in Estonia during more than forty years.

The annexation of Estonia in 1940 soon brought with it the nationalisation of the applied arts' schools and studios and the adjustment of the instruction to the canons of Soviet ideology. The spirit of the times was well expressed at the opening ceremony of the Tallinn State Applied Arts Institute in 1944, where the delegate of the Estonian Communist Party made clear that: "... creating real works of art in our socialist society is only possible by mastering and fully grasping the party's teaching."

The times of political repressions from the end of 1940s to the beginning of 1950s were the toughest test of all for the fledgling Estonian applied arts. Direct persecution of several leading artists accused of 'formalism' and 'nationalism', accompanied with the propagation of vacuous 'socialist internationalism', did not cease until the death of Stalin in 1953.

Evidently, however, the established traditions proved to be strong enough to maintain Estonia among the strongest applied arts centres in the Soviet Union and the whole of Northern Europe, this with regard to the number as well as the high standard of the taught subjects, such as ceramics, glass-, metal-, leatherwork and artistic textile. Besides local students, numerous applied artists from Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova and other 'republics' of the Soviet Union acquired their education at the Estonian State Art Institute formed in 1951 from several higher art educational establishments.

Quite new perspectives for the instruction and practice of applied arts opened with the restoration of the Republic of Estonia in 1991. Already the first years of independence saw the (re-)establishment of several centres of study, as well as intense contacts with neighbouring countries and beyond.

In 2000, after an interval of almost half a century, higher applied art education returned to Tartu with the founding of Tartu Art College. An important centre for applied art studies in today's Estonia, concerning methods of work, applications of techniques and general ideology, TAC has adopted an approach close to that of the Arts and Crafts movement and the Bauhaus: functionality and regard for material should be given as much attention as the form. The curricula of the College's departments of furniture, textile and leather art emphasise the importance of acquiring traditional working techniques, which provide the right touch of technique necessary for any artistic selfexpression.

Yet, as a reminiscence of the past centralisation, the hub for research and education of applied arts in Estonia remains in Tallinn. The Faculty of Design of the Estonian Academy of Art which includes the departments of jewellery and blacksmithing, ceramics, glass, leather art and textile, continue to provide education for the students from both Estonia and abroad.

One of the many ancient skills in danger of oblivion in Estonia that the staff and students of the TAC have thought worthwhile to revive, is the Oriental method of hand-block printing of fabric.

In addition to the above, the nearly one-hundred-years-old Estonian academic art teaching tradition has once again turned to research scientifically its peasant 'prehistory'. The newly-established (2002) Chair of Traditional Art at the EAA sees its aim in "... researching our heritage as a source of inspiration and examining its function in the framework of the modern art discourse."

This is hardly surprising, in our times of unprecedented hodgepodge of ideologies, especially when one realises that the subconscious of the predominantly second or third generation townspeople of Estonia still largely associates with fixed residence, particular locality and Estonia in general. Hence the occasionally surfacing interest of modern applied artists in their one-time heritage - the language of form, symbols and emblems of their rural ancestors.