How to deal with art of the Soviet era?
The Soviet era was a period when Estonia was part of the USSR as one of the Union Republics. A positive achievement at the time was establishing the structure of the Art Museum of Estonia with its numerous branches and sizeable collections. Bulk of the 7,045 paintings, 24,537 prints and 1,571 sculptures in the main collections of the Art Museum of Estonia were acquired during the Soviet times. Soviet art system with its ideological points of departure and control mechanisms was a very retrograde structure that hindered the developments in art. It is difficult to characterise the collection of art from the 1941–1990 in the Art Museum of Estonia through artistic terms that were used elsewhere in the world during the second half of the 20th century, because the concept of Socialist realism was given preference. That concept of a style in art, established by Stalin in 1933, changed its meaning during the course of time, and from the 1970s onwards it was mainly used to mark restrictions that artists could never violate anyhow. Estonian art from the Soviet times varies quite considerably during different decades and we can rightfully speak of contemporary trends in the development of art. Art Museum of Estonia has divided the collections of art from that period into different sections, based on the following keywords: 1941–1956 Socialist realism The Stagnation and Perestroika have divided the 1980s into different periods, where we can see a rapid rise of national spirit and joining the trans-avant-garde movement. At the same time, throughout the whole period in Estonian art, artists created works that were considered ‘national’ and ‘Estonian’, using the concept of national school in painting, preferring timeless themes to the Soviet present-day or borrowing motifs from our folklore that were especially wide-spread in Estonian graphic art. The collection of Soviet art concentrates on classical genres in art, leaving photography and other types of art based on new technologies out from the concept of art. Eha Komissarov,
1956–1970 Modernism (Abstractionism, Surrealism and other examples from the development of modern art after World War II)
During the 1970s Pop Art and Hyperrealism appeared in Estonian art as an influence of the counter-cultural activity of the young, and Hyperrealism found a wider bearing area as slide painting. Avant-garde artistic experiments did not meet the rules of the censored society and in the Soviet times that sort of art was not considered a part of the official mainstream art. Art Museum of Estonia started collecting the so-called ‘excluded art’ as early as in the 1980s and is still collecting it now.
Curator of the Kumu Art Museum
