RIGA - Art can provide a profound, if somewhat abstract, window onto the culture depicted within its gilded frames. Imagine, then, the story that emerges from "Latvian Post-War Art 1945 - 2004," the new permanent exhibition at Arsenals. It is an absolutely fascinating trip through oil-painted times.
The exhibition is divided up into five rather naively titled categories: "At the Crossing" (1945 - the 1950s), "The Men Are Coming" (the latter half of the 1950s), "Land of Humans" (the 1960s - the 1970s), "Sunstroke" (the 1980s) and "Door to Heaven" (1991 - 2004). Between them, these five categories attempt for the first time to systematically categorize and assess post-war Latvian art.
It's a little strange to think that art in Latvia can be reduced to a "Latvian art," but if you consider the historic circumstances under which artists had to work until independence, it does make some sort of sense.
The first painting you see as you enter the gallery is a vast and iconic Last Supper-like painting of Lenin surrounded by a group of Latvian riflemen, all of whom are reverentially gazing at and doting on the great bearded-one. The painting nicely sets the scene for an epic walkabout through the annals of artistic subversion, subservience, naivety and passion.
Paintings like Indulis Zarins' "What a Height!" (1958), which shows a muscular Soviet worker standing bravely on top of a huge new building under construction, shows just how subjugated Latvian art was in the post-war years.
Artists who didn't follow the esthetic principles of social realism could be expelled from the influential Union of Artists and essentially sent into artistic exile, along with any hope of making a living.
It wasn't until the 1960s and 1970s that Latvian artists finally began to find the freedom to follow their own agendas, although they still had to be careful with their subject matter. But this was nonetheless a rich period for Latvian art, and the first time since the 1930s that it at least had something in common with the fast-changing trends in Western art.
The brilliant Boris Berzins was prolific and his radically inventive techniques and beautifully conceived ideas allowed him to create, perhaps for the first time since the war, a uniquely Latvian language in painting. His peers, such as Dzemma Skulme, Bruno Vasiljevskis and Imants Lancamis, were also experimenting with new techniques and forms to subtly get around and condemn the system in which they lived and worked.
Liga Purmale's wonderful painting "Journey" (1974) is a fine example of the newfound confidence and boldness of Latvian art at this time. It shows a group of people waiting to catch a bus, with the whole scene painted in the style of a photographic negative. The image subtly drains the subjects of their individuality, and uses minimal form to suggest redundant content.
The 1980s was a frantic period in Latvian art, as the momentum toward independence grew with each passing year. And yet, while much of the art on show is admirable for its (anti) ideological enthusiasm, it remains strangely naive in the context of European art as a whole. Birute Delle's "Sunstroke" (1988) is a pretty enough picture, but it is almost stroke for stroke a reproduction of Edvard Munch.
Perhaps the saddest thing about this exhibition, though, is that it reveals how lost post-independence art seems at times. Yes, there are some notable works, such as Ritums Ivanovs' "A La Veneer" (2001) and Franceska Kirke's "Forged Purvitis" (2002), but for the most part too many of the post-independence artists appear to be mimicking rather than really creating, and groping for subject matter rather than grabbing at it like their predecessors did.
Arsenals
1 Torna Street
Open: Tue - Sun 11 a.m. -
5 p.m., closed Mon
