The Arts in Middlesex: After the Thaw

It’s hard to know exactly what Kaarel Kurismaa’s assemblage titled “Solstice” is about, and that just might be the point.

The Estonian artist created the work in 1975. Kurismaa worked as a department store window designer. “Solstice” is a sort of miniature store window. Behind glass is a blue background and a white mannequin face with blue sunglasses, eyebrows and lips. From the top of the window hangs a white ball, presumably (based on the title) the sun. Tiny pieces of Styrofoam swirl around the piece occasionally, blown by a hair dryer (the original Polish model that Kurismaa installed in 1975).

Americans may take department store windows for granted, but they were a big deal in Estonia under the Khrushchev Thaw of the 1950s and ‘60s, when Soviet Union censorship was loosened to some degree.

“You suddenly had public displays that weren’t propaganda, they were just about consumption and clothing and things for the home,” says Jeremy Canwell, the curator of “Mystics and Moderns: Painting in Estonia before Glasnost” at the Zimmerli Museum in New Brunswick through Oct. 11. “These public displays were perpetually visible, and these sort of passive objects that were about desire that tried to transform casual viewers into active consumers. That’s a very different kind of imagery, it has goals that are very different from Socialist propaganda.”

The exhibit is comprised of works from the Zimmerli’s Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Soviet Nonconformist Art, created between 1956 and 1986. That collection features works from all of the Soviet Republics. “And it turns out there’s quite a substantial and representative and extremely high-quality collection of Estonian works of art,” Canwell says.

Artists whose work appears in “Mystics and Moderns” include Leonhard Lapin, Kaja Karner and Raul Meel. Visitors may notice Western influences in the pieces, from surrealism to pop art.

“But then (the artists) ask you to ask, Why?” Canwell says. “Why is it resituated in this way and why is it reinterpreting this form from somewhere else? That turns out to be a characteristic of Estonian modern art.”

Western styles, Canwell says, were associated with “modernity,” which Estonians embraced much later than other European countries. “So they were sort of establishing their European identity and their political sovereignty and their culture all at the same time.”

Pop Art elements are seen in several works, including a self portrait of Lapin, which is a red silhouette of the artist against a white background. “The White Wave” features blue, white and red stripes in a pattern that resembles sergeant stripes.

In Juri Arrak’s “Dance,” two identical women kick in a can-can style. Repeating an image in a work seems inspired by Warhol, and wall text explains that the artist was influenced by the sexualized female forms created by Tom Wesselmann.

Canwell says Arrak’s painting touches upon Estonian’s national tradition prior to Soviet art and the re-discovery of European modernism. “But these new forms of American pop art, are sort of brought together in this picture,” he says. “He unites a lot of the different concerns that I wanted to bring out with the show.”

One of the exhibit’s most striking pieces is Rein Tammik’s “In the Studio,” an oil painting from the early 1980s. The artist in Vermeer’s “The Art of Painting” is rendered nearly exactly on a large canvas. But surrounding the baroque artist are modern art journals and images of Sputnik, a nuclear mushroom cloud and a Soviet jet.

“I think one of the problems for artists in the Soviet experience was that time was regulated,” Canwell says. “Every experience, every aspect of life was documented and acquired and approved and overly administrated… Everything was either required or forbidden.”

Tammik’s painting, perhaps, expresses a desire, perhaps need, to break free of that regulation.

“This is what happens in a culture where people really want to find certain metaphysical ways to outstrip the regulation of their lives,” Canwell says. “He does this, I think, by involving all of these bits, these cues, in the image that are about the passage of time.”

“Mystics and Moderns: Painting in Estonia before Glasnost” is on view a the Zimmerli Art Museum, 71 Hamilton Street (at the corner of George Street on the College Avenue campus of Rutgers University), New Brunswick through Oct. 11. The museum is open Tues.-Fri. 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Sat. noon-5 p.m. On the first Wednesday of each month (except August), the museum is open from 10 a.m.-9 p.m. The museum is closed on major holidays and for the month of August. Admission costs $6, $5 seniors (over 65), free for museum members, Rutgers students, faculty and staff and children under 18. Admission is free on the first Sunday of each month. For information, call 732-932-7237 or go to www.zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu