![\"\"](\"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/1.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nIt\u2019s obvious that features of a landscape gave rise to intense emotions in M\u00e4gi, and that they also gave him a sense of familiarity. Having travelled from \u00c5land and Helsinki to Paris in 1907, he wrote to Anni Vesanto, the daughter of his landlord in Finland:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI am a son of the North and everything in me is nothing but a particle of the entire people and our nature. Wherever I happen to be, the North always remains my homeland (in the broader sense). I like the wistful, harsh nature of the North, the bright glimmers of sunlight that can often be seen in the work of local artists.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With its focus on the connection between landscape and the human mind, M\u00e4gi\u2019s vision can indeed be called national romantic. The idea of correspondence between nature and humanity, a unity of nature and the mind, was an aspiration in early German romanticism. This idea, championed by Friedrich Schiller, found its transcendental expression in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, the idea of appropriating nature as a landscape and a mental conception, as an embodiment of one\u2019s consciousness and a cornerstone of identity, was of much earlier provenance, its roots going back at least to the 17th century, as Svetlana Alpers has shown in her study of the cartographic features of Dutch landscape painting. German romanticism also played a part in Estonian nationalism in the late 1800s, although I do not know what M\u00e4gi thought about it. We can assume, however, that, in addition to Finnish art, M\u00e4gi was also familiar with the Nordic genre of the so-called \u201cmood landscape\u201d \u2013 \u201cst\u00e4mningslandskapet\u201d in Swedish \u2013 which was founded on the idea of constant interaction between nature and the artist\u2019s mind, and the expression of that influence in art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are almost never any people in Konrad M\u00e4gi\u2019s landscapes. However, a few paintings feature an almost symbiotic union between the landscape and a human figure. I am thinking of Portrait of a Norwegian Girl<\/em> (1909, Tartu Art Museum) and especially Meditation (Landscape and Woman)<\/em>, (1915\u20131916, Estonian Art Museum).<\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s particularly intriguing about the portrait of the Norwegian girl in her national costume is that, instead of a landscape, the background appears to be a wall rug that symbolises the national mindscape. Both these paintings connect the feminine element with the ground, its character and its vitality. That connection was a fairly common topos<\/em> or image type in art of that period. These two works, however, are important in this context because they illustrate M\u00e4gi\u2019s intense relationship with nature as well as the powerful connotations between landscape and the human mind. M\u00e4gi also painted at least one portrait of a man, which can be considered a symbolic landscape: Portrait of Pastor Johannes Ernst Mickwitz<\/em> (1915, private collection)<\/p>\n\n\n\n With its distinctly symbolistic emphasis on the correspondence between nature and the soul, the windswept landscape seems to be an embodiment of the thoughts moving in the pensive pastor\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The varied shapes of the so-called \u2018northern\u2019 landscape \u2013 valleys and hills set against the sky, waters glittering below \u2013 are capable of producing what is known as \u2018threshold situations\u2019 in the viewer\u2019s mind. On their travels, artists would in fact expose themselves deliberately to such encounters. These liminal experiences \u2013 \u201cr\u00e4umliche Schwellensituationen\u201d to give the German term invented by Johannes Hauck \u2013 could be produced especially by cliffs, shorelines, mountain tops, riverbanks and areas bordering between nature and cultural space. M\u00e4gi was clearly drawn to such threshold features in the landscape, sketching the views rapturously and later painting them in his studio either impulsively or with deliberation. I\u2019m afraid I do not know whether he painted landscapes also outdoors, but if someone knows, I would be glad to hear about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If we compare M\u00e4gi\u2019s landscapes from \u00c5land and Norway with the landscapes painted by another Estonian artist, Nikolai Triik, it is interesting to note that Triik tended to paint the sky whereas M\u00e4gi usually depicted tracts of land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In M\u00e4gi\u2019s paintings, the horizon is very rarely below the centre line, suggesting that the vantage point is located just above the ground, which opens up the terrain to view more widely. This is particularly notable in works containing diagonal lines that enhance the sense of depth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What originally captured M\u00e4gi\u2019s interest in a landscape, may touch the viewer of the finished painting even today. In some of M\u00e4gi\u2019s landscapes, the pictorial space is composed in such a way that the point of view is occupied by an \u2018internal spectator\u2019, a term coined by philosopher Richard Wollheim. The internal spectator sees the view from the same perspective as the person standing in front of the painting, but within the illusory landscape of the depicted image. Some of M\u00e4gi\u2019s landscapes are such that the viewer becomes aware of the artist himself as a traveller who experienced the landscape physically. The painting communicates some aspect of the experience to the viewer, who can imagine herself being in the actual place. This response tends to occur in works where the middle ground is absent, that is, where the pictorial space is clearly divided into a zone where the artist-traveller is located \u2013 often at a high scenic spot \u2013 and a zone in the distance, such as a line of hills set against the background of a cloudy sky, with an inaccessible natural feature \u2013 a hollow, river, lake or bay \u2013 intervening between the two. It is in such a configuration of features that the liminal threshold experience is engendered which can enrapture the artist and viewer alike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This pictorial configuration is present in certain landscapes M\u00e4gi painted near Kihelkonna in Saaremaa and on the nearby island of Vilsandi in 1913 and 1914, as well as in some later works, such as the landscape views he painted at P\u00fchaj\u00e4rv in 1918\u20131920, or the painting On the Road from Viljandi to Tartu<\/em> (1914\u20131915, Estonian Art Museum). In some of the Saaremaa images, the horizontal landscape appears as if it were slightly tilted, to an imaginary angle of about 40\u201350 degrees, which directs attention to the foreground and raises the land closer to the viewer, allowing its colours and shapes to create a strong emotional response. One of the works where this illusion can be observed is Sea Kales<\/em> (1913\u20131914, Estonian Art Museum).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Saaremaa landscapes also illustrate M\u00e4gi\u2019s new approach to colour, which must have been inspired by his trip to Paris in 1912, his stay at the Acad\u00e9mie Vassilieff and his encounter with neo-impressionist art at the Salon des Independants. M\u00e4gi\u2019s skill in creating luminous effects by using colour juxtapositions and blending different hues in discrete small surfaces side by side, gives his paintings a sensory power that seduces the viewer and pulls her into the painting, as noted by Pilvi Kalhama in her writings about M\u00e4gi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It has also been argued that we have M\u00e4gi\u2019s paintings to thank for the fact that Saaremaa has become a visual embodiment or metaphor for Estonia. However, M\u00e4gi\u2019s virtuoso use of colour makes it possible to find rapport with his works, to discover in them a correspondence with one\u2019s inner feelings, even for those who know nothing about M\u00e4gi or his life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n —<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to say a few words about M\u00e4gi as a modernist, perhaps even as an avant-garde artist. The latter label has to do with M\u00e4gi\u2019s transgressive treatment of the subject in some of his Norwegian landscapes. The most famous of them is probably Norwegian Landscape with a Pine Tree<\/em> (1910, Art Museum of Estonia),<\/p>\n\n\n\n a work that seems almost to have been painted in a fit of delirium. Eero Epner has argued convincingly that the painting reflects the influence of Swedish writer Ola Hansson\u2019s collection of short stories entitled Sensitiva<\/em> amorosa<\/em> (\u201cSensitive Lovely,\u201d 1887), which made a profound impression on M\u00e4gi. M\u00e4gi wrote to Vesanto about the collection in early 1908, and describes Hansson by quoting the words of a critic:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe draws the world as something uninterrupted. He doesn\u2019t accentuate discrete points in that flood of phenomena, he doesn\u2019t register them like people have done, describing them as \u201cthings\u201d, \u201cboundaries\u201d, \u201ccontradictions\u201d \u2013 for him this flood is not interrupted anywhere. There are no contrasts for the new spirit, no contradictions, since everything is presented to its reason \u2013 like an endless chain of transitions of feelings that is constantly changing, which quiver in all tones and colours but in their richness are inseparably tied to one another since there are no doubts that do not turn into cranial nerve oscillations and conscious vibration.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many of the features mentioned in the passage are quite prominent in the painting \u2013 the transcendence of time and place, the quivering of tones and colours, the nervous oscillation of abstracted forms \u2013 although one can tell that the work depicts a marshland in the light of the setting sun as seen from a hill. In M\u00e4gi\u2019s vision, however, the view is transformed into a two-dimensional apocalyptic scene dotted with oval eye-like geological-volcanic shapes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As an image of the internal world of emotions, the painting is reminiscent of Edvard Munch\u2019s symbolic works, albeit with a higher degree of abstraction. M\u00e4gi had seen some of Munch\u2019s paintings in Paris at the Salon des Independants in 1908, and already then he made the observation that \u201cthe most interesting of all of them is a Norwegian painter Edvard Munch.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n From the modernist perspective, the intriguing thing about M\u00e4gi\u2019s art \u2013 in addition to his distinctive philosophy of colour and free treatment of motif \u2013 is his vitalist yet anguished dualism, and how it became part of the general artistic context of his time. M\u00e4gi had been an athlete and a keen fighter in his youth. Physical bragging and what we would call toxic masculinity were quite common in those days, especially among artists from an agrarian background. Examples abound, at least in Finland, the best known being Tyko Sallinen, M\u00e4gi\u2019s contemporary with whom M\u00e4gi even studied for a short while in Helsinki.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It appears, however, that M\u00e4gi\u2019s torn background and his bouts of illness made him see life as a torment from which only art could bring at least temporary relief. His rhetoric of suffering is also associated with Nietzschean pathos, possibly adopted from Nikolai Triik during his time in St Petersburg around 1903.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet it has been observed that M\u00e4gi would also complain about hunger and poverty even when there was no apparent reason to do so. Could this have been a facet of his persona as a bohemian artist?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Regarding the subject matter of M\u00e4gi\u2019s art, an explicit depiction of suffering only surfaces in the lost Piet\u00e0<\/em> painting from 1919.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We should note, however, that likening of the artist himself or the destiny of his nation to Christ was not an uncommon theme in contemporary art of the period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Artists were drawn to Nietzsche\u2019s idea of the \u00dcbermensch-artist who held disdain for the bourgeoisie \u2013 a supreme individual with the strength of will to rise above the status quo and carve a unique path he alone could travel. Without downplaying the challenging conditions Estonian artists faced at the time, coupled with their lack of institutional support, we can observe the emergence of the \u201csuffering male artist\u201d as a kind of trope later reinforced by art literature. In one of her articles, Tiina Abel has pointed out that this is how the archetype of the \u201cfreezing artist\u201d became part of Estonian art history. A similar phenomenon unfolded in Finland, particularly among the artists associated with Tyko Sallinen\u2019s circle, a trend described by Viljo Kojo in two novels from 1922 and \u201823. In European art literature, the starving yet totally committed bohemian artist is often associated with the streets of Montparnasse \u2013 names like Modigliani, Soutine, and Chagall come to mind. A notable landmark often included in accounts of the quarter was La Ruche, or the \u201cbeehive\u201d, a legendary artist\u2019s residence which was also frequented by M\u00e4gi and other Estonian artists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead of examining M\u00e4gi\u2019s bohemian persona as a role, perhaps it would be more to the point to see him as a representative of modern decadence in the sense that Mirjam Hinrikus has discussed the phenomenon. This might help explain the alternation between contrasting elements, such as primitive behaviour and neurasthenia, sophisticated attire and suffering, illness and a sense of strength, or restlessness and the accompanying frustration with provincialism and metropolitan art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lastly, I should mention one more aspect related to the artist\u2019s image and the concept of \u201cnorthern\u201d art that M\u00e4gi championed. M\u00e4gi was a practicing artist at the time when Wilhelm Worringer, the German art historian, published his famous doctoral thesis Abstraktion<\/em> und<\/em> Einf\u00fchlung<\/em> (1909). The core idea of the book is that the will to art manifests itself emotionally in two ways: through obsessive abstraction and a sense of empathy. Worringer also suggested that a proclivity for obsessive abstraction was a hallmark of peoples of the north, who are driven to seek solace in art by abstracting and elevating objects from the external world. Worringer regarded Gothic as a pathological style among German and Nordic artists, which he believed had a direct link to the suggestive power of early 20th century expressionism. In Finland, Worringer\u2019s ideas became known in 1915 through Der<\/em> Expressionismus<\/em>, a book by Paul Fechter, a German who lived in Vilnius.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, Jaan Kangilaski has half-jokingly called M\u00e4gi a \u201cGerman\u201d artist in that M\u00e4gi\u2019s outward form was proper but inside he was a barbarian. In a Worringerian perspective, expressionism in M\u00e4gi\u2019s work is perhaps most evident in certain landscapes from P\u00fchaj\u00e4rv and Capri, such as Capri Motif<\/em> (1922\u201323, Enn Kunila Collection),<\/p>\n\n\n\n in which the slightly unstable street bears a resemblance to contemporaneous street scenes by another Estonian artist, Peet Aren.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet M\u00e4gi\u2019s art also embodied the other dimension that Worringer alludes to \u2013 a deep trust in the external manifestation of life and genuine appreciation of its beauty. Or as M\u00e4gi himself put it, he liked an austere landscape illuminated by bright sunbeams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He would probably never have been able to blend those contrasting elements in such an inimitable way had he not had a strong conviction, even before embarking on a career in art, that his task was, in the words of the poet, to gather disturbing murmur of rustling fields and transfer it onto his canvas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n THANK YOU, KIITOS, AIT\u00c4H<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Timo Huusko In a letter he sent from Paris to Anni Vesanto in Helsinki in 1907, Konrad M\u00e4gi wrote that he had been reminded of the words of a Polish poet: \u201cOh, son of this poor land,he who from the rustling fieldsgathered together that strangely disturbing murmurand took his songs and thoughts into the world\u201d… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4490"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4490"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4492,"href":"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4490\/revisions\/4492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/2.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/3.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/4.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/5.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/6.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/7.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/8.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/9.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/10.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/11.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/12.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/13.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/14.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n