I had not heard of Konrad Mägi until cycling to the shores of the saadjärv. This is one of several long, thin lakes separated by moraine hillocks northeast of Tartu. Primarily a landscape painter, Mägi spent his last two full summers capturing this picturesque region of post-glacial lakes and drumlins.
A billboard of paintings caught my eye, reminding me of alternately of Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse.
Titled Äksi Church, this view of the saadjärv in 1924 was among Mägi’s last works. A website in his memory says: “The heart of the painting is again made up of clouds, which Mägi has doubled on the surface of the water, thus making the painting space fuller, but also adding layers with mysterious overtones.” By this time of life the artist was suffering from chronic ill health and depression.
Born in 1878 near Elva in southern Estonia during Tsarist times, Mägi learned to draw in Tartu, also studying art in St Petersburg, arriving in Paris in 1907. His brief time there coincided with the Fauvism movement championed by Matisse and others, also of brief duration. The painters of bright-coloured landscapes soon ran out of inspiration, and Mägi moved to Norway where his style continued to evolve.
After several years of poverty and starvation, Mägi found success in 1910 with an exhibition in Tallinn, and then tried and failed to break into Paris art circles who were by this time fascinated with Picasso’s Cubism. Mägi returned to Estonia, disappointed, spending most of his time in Estonia, painting and teaching art in Tartu, interspersed with painting trips to Italy and Germany.
The Estonian war of independence further affected his mood, tilting him more towards Expressionism; his beautiful works and use of colour remind me of August Macke and, to an extent, Wassily Kandinsky. And yet Estonia’s foremost Modern painter figures not at all in several art history books on hand. I find this surprising. Besides the French Impressionists – for me - Mägi’s landscapes have a poignant beauty to them, and a clear, appealing style.
An explanation could lie in a comparison with the Swiss Expressionist painter Paul Klee who was roughly the same age as Mägi. While the Estonian was pursuing a future in Paris, Klee exhibited in Munich where he met and became friends and colleagues with Kandinsky and Macke. That launched Klee’s career, in Germany, where he developed his unique style in sympathetic circles, and his entry into modern art fame was assured.
Mägi took to wandering the shores of Saaremaa during the summer, and later the countryside around Otepää and the pühajärv, Estonia’s holy or sacred lake, besides his visits to Venice, the island of Capri, and the Bavarian Alps.
A biographical note says, “Mägi aspired towards metaphysical, mystical, irrational experiences by way of nature scenes, desiring to find in landscapes what in Mägi’s opinion everyday life did not have.” He died in 1925, still painting vigorously, fuelled on coffee and cigarettes.
Thinking on whether there was any future for me in the land of my ancestors, my diary records: “A good road into the drumlin country, Vooremaa. We arrived at Äksi to a beautiful lake, and went to an Ice Age museum. It showed how the landscape had changed as the ice melted away, leaving behind the characteristic post-glacial landforms. These define Estonia in a way.”
Covering 2 per cent of Estonia’s land area, Vooremaa has been described as “the most visually impressive drumlin field in the Baltic States”. Trending northwest-southeast, the drumlins lie up to 13 km in length, as much as 2 km wide, and rising 70 metres above the surrounding plains.
Riding northwards, we passed more lakes and crossed more drumlins, fields of harvested grain and stands of forest, by then established in my mind as Mägi country, heading towards Palamuse, the home of the early 20th Century writer Oskar Luts. We ended a memorable day at a campsite beside a small, round pond set into a grassy field, the epic hero Kalevipoeg’s handwash basin.
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