{"id":714,"date":"2018-10-30T15:36:40","date_gmt":"2018-10-30T15:36:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/?page_id=714"},"modified":"2023-02-23T08:48:43","modified_gmt":"2023-02-23T08:48:43","slug":"biography","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/konradmagi.ee\/en\/biography\/","title":{"rendered":"Biography"},"content":{"rendered":"

Konrad M\u00e4gi (1878-1925) was one of the first modernist painters in Estonia and the Nordic countries<\/h1>\n

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He was born in 1878 in Southern Estonia and spent his early childhood<\/a> there. Little is known about his family: his mother was a farmer\u2019s wife, and his father was a manager of manorial estates who also participated in the Estonian nationalist movement. M\u00e4gi was 11 years old when his family moved to Tartu. Alas his education turned out to be extremely brief.<\/p>\n

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1898 Sangernebo Regiment<\/p><\/div>\n

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Enganging in sports in the meadow beside the Emaj\u00f5gi River (1897). Konrad M\u00e4gi is on the extreme left, Aleksander Meibaum and Karl Alfred Jentson stand beside him.<\/p><\/div>\n

He went to work in Tartu<\/a> as an apprentice joiner. As a youth, he and his friends started taking an interest in physical culture as well as various cultural pursuits (theatre, music, literature, etc.). Additionally, on the orders of his employer, he attended drawing courses, which all in all led to his increasing interest in figurative art. This was an unusual wish in early 20th<\/sup> century Estonia. Since there was no opportunity for studying art in Estonia, M\u00e4gi went to St. Petersburg.<\/a><\/p>\n

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The Stieglitz Art School in St. Petersburg was of a more technical orientation. Students there learned to design furniture, wallpaper, etc. M\u00e4gi actively visited exhibitions and it was in this city\u2019s museums that he gained his first extensive experience of art, but he left school discontentedly. He participated in numerous events of the Revolution of 1905, studied briefly at a studio, yet soon left St. Petersburg, going to \u00c5land together with his friends in the summer of 1906. That is precisely where M\u00e4gi painted his first paintings<\/a> (primarily under the influence of Nikolai Triik). We know almost nothing nowadays about these paintings. When he went to Helsinki in the autumn, M\u00e4gi did not continue to intensively paint. For years already, his dream had been to go to Paris, yet prior to that he had to work transcribing Estonian folk songs for a year in Helsinki with that goal in mind. M\u00e4gi finally travelled to Paris<\/a> in the autumn of 1907.<\/p>\n

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Estonian students of the Stieglitz school (1904).
Konrad M\u00e4gi sits in the middle row at the left end. In front of him sits Karl Alfred Jentson, behind him at the left end stands Nikolai Triik. On the far right of those standing is Aleksander Tassa<\/p>\n

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1906. A\u030aland Motif<\/p>\n

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The Estonian colony in Paris (1912). Konrad M\u00e4gi stands at the leht end, beside him
is Friedebert Tuglas, Jaan Koort and Ferdinand Kull.<\/p><\/div>\n

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1908. Norwegian Landscape with Pine<\/p><\/div>\n

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1909. Norwegian Landscape<\/p><\/div><\/blockquote>\n

M\u00e4gi lived in meagre conditions in Paris<\/a>, yet tried to find opportunities to continue studying and also for painting. His lack of money made this very difficult. Additionally, M\u00e4gi started becoming fed up with the big city. He went to Norway with his friends for the summer of 1908 with the wish to spend a few summer months there. Yet when his friends returned to Paris in the autumn, M\u00e4gi was forced to remain in Norway because he had too little money. Although in his letters he complained for the following two years about being hard up for money and about the unfriendliness of the conditions there, it is precisely Norway where M\u00e4gi started painting intensively<\/a>. He is known to have completed at least 75 paintings there (there were most likely even more of them and M\u00e4gi already sold many of them in Norway in order to earn money). These paintings almost exclusively depict deserted landscapes. With their bold colours, hallucinatory images and expressive experiences of nature, they reflect M\u00e4gi\u2019s emotional states, but also the distinctive feature of his experiences of nature: for M\u00e4gi, the landscape was a place where alongside aesthetic experiences, religious and exalted experiences could also be gained.<\/p>\n

M\u00e4gi\u2019s paintings were displayed at art exhibitions that were held in Tartu and Tallinn in 1910, and they immediately became immensely popular<\/a>. M\u00e4gi travelled from Norway to Paris with the money he earned from the sale of his works. There he tried unsuccessfully to achieve a breakthrough in local art circles. His painting excursion to Normandy was admittedly successful and M\u00e4gi succeeded in having three of his paintings displayed at an exhibition. He returned to Estonia in the spring of 1912 after being abroad for years.<\/p>\n

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1913. Sea Kale<\/p><\/div>\n

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1917. Southern Estonian Landscape<\/p><\/div><\/blockquote>\n

Here he initially sank into depression. At the same time, his health had already suffered serious damage from starvation and poor living conditions. In the summer of 1913, he went to Saaremaa<\/a> to improve his health, but was charmed by the natural settings there and returned to Saaremaa the following summer as well. Over the course of those two summers, he completed a new series of paintings that stands out with the intensiveness of its experiences of nature, its abundance of light and colour, yet also its prominent modernist features. Here the artist\u2019s subjective manner of depiction became more important than the realistic canon: the question \u2018how to paint\u2019 is more important than the question \u2018what to paint\u2019.<\/p>\n

Over the following years, M\u00e4gi consistently lived in Tartu but while living in the city, he painted only portraits and still-lifes, but not cityscapes. In the summers, he went on excursions to various places in Southern Estonia<\/a> (the vicinity of Viljandi, V\u00f5ru County, Kasaritsa, Otep\u00e4\u00e4 and the surroundings of P\u00fchaj\u00e4rve Lake, etc.) and his oeuvre underwent a more minor or a more major change almost every year. The style of his brushstroke and his colouring became altered, along with his angles and foreshortening, composition, and to some extent also his choice of motifs. His paintings became ever darker and more closed in, while obscurely perceptible religious undertones emerged ever more frequently at their core. M\u00e4gi aspired towards metaphysical, mystical, irrational experiences by way of nature scenes, desiring to find in landscapes what in M\u00e4gi\u2019s opinion everyday life did not have.<\/p>\n

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1923 Konrad M\u00e4gi in the midst of his students<\/p><\/div>\n

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1921. Motif of Naples<\/p><\/div>\n

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1922. Ruins in Capri<\/p><\/div><\/blockquote>\n

M\u00e4gi became an art teacher in the 1910s and was one of the founders of the Pallas<\/a> Art Society. When the Pallas Art School opened its doors in 1919, M\u00e4gi was elected director of the school. Nevertheless, discontent with conditions in Estonia deepened and in 1921, he went to Italy<\/a> by way of Germany. His final complete creative period began there, focusing on views of Rome, Capri and Venice. Although we see numerous seemingly urbanistic motifs instead of landscapes, M\u00e4gi continued to aspire towards different kinds of experiences, which he had described in one of his early letters as the creation of art with the help of the \u2018path of the soul\u2019. We never see references to modernity and his present time in M\u00e4gi\u2019s paintings. He treated time abstractly when he painted in Italy<\/a> as well, largely purging his works of paraphernalia associated with people.<\/p>\n

M\u00e4gi returned to Estonia in 1922, but his health already deteriorated<\/a> to such an extent that although he continued to paint, he did so less frequently and no longer with his former vigour. The lack of a correct diagnosis of his condition allowed his illness to progress unchecked, and he was taken to the hospital in the spring of 1925, where he died at the age of 46 in August of that same year.<\/p>\n

The total number of M\u00e4gi\u2019s paintings<\/a> is thought to have been approximately 400 paintings. Half of them are lost or have been destroyed. A great deal of attention has accompanied his works from the very beginning. Only at the start of the Soviet occupation of Estonia at the end of the 1940s and the early 1950s were M\u00e4gi\u2019s paintings banned and their public exposition was prohibited. Extensive exhibitions were held in the following decades. A monograph from the pen of Evi Pihlak and various shorter treatments were published. A medal in the name of Konrad M\u00e4gi for honouring painters was also established. Interest in Konrad M\u00e4gi has also grown in Europe at the end of the 2010s: his solo exhibition has been held at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, and M\u00e4gi\u2019s works have also been on display at the Vittoriano museum complex in Rome and at the Orsay Museum in Paris within the framework of the Baltic Symbolism exhibition.<\/p>\n

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Konrad M\u00e4gi (1878-1925) was one of the first modernist painters in Estonia and the Nordic countries   He was born in 1878 in Southern Estonia and spent his early childhood there. Little is known about his family: his mother was a farmer\u2019s wife, and his father was a manager of manorial estates who also participated… <\/p>\n

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