Adamson-Eric

Biography

In 1929 a “Portrait of My Father”, painted a year earlier, was bought at an exhibition of Estonian art in Paris. It was acquired for the Jeu de Paume museum and is now in the collection of the Centre Pompidou. Adamson-Eric was one of the organisers of that exhibition and showed his own work there.

He was born on 18 August 1902 in Tartu (then Yuryev, in the Governorate of Livonia), into the family of the clothes merchant Jaan Adamson and his wife Anna, the fourth of six children. He attended the Alexander Gymnasium and then Hugo Treffner Gymnasium, and in 1920–1923 he sat in on the law faculty of the University of Tartu as an auditor and was enrolled at the Pallas art school.

In 1923 he went to Berlin, to the Charlottenburg school of arts and crafts, where he studied surface decoration. From 1924 he lived in Paris and studied at independent academies: with Charles Guérin at the Académie Colarossi, with Roger Bissière, Georges Braque, André Lhote and Moïse Kisling, and later with Vasily Shukhaev. By the artist’s own account, in the spring of 1924 he painted on Montmartre with a fellow student. Almost all of his Paris works are lost or scattered; 25 of them are in the United States. In 1925 he travelled through Italy from Genoa to Naples and visited Capri.

In May 1928, with Kristjan Teder and Eduard Wiiralt, he exhibited in Oslo as the “Group of Parisian Estonian Artists”. In June and July the same three showed work in Tallinn, then in Pärnu, where Anton Starkopf joined them. His first solo exhibition was held at the Estonian Art Museum from November 1929 to January 1930: 17 paintings and textiles woven at a women’s vocational school in Tallinn. In 1929–1930 he lived in Paris on a grant from an Estonian fund for the visual arts. Among his early works is “Self-Portrait with a Loop” (1929), and the portraits and still lifes of those years share a brownish palette and close attention to the texture of objects.

In the autumn of 1933 he travelled through Central Europe to Greece and lived in Athens for about half a year; he also visited the monasteries of Mount Athos. After that he turned to painting outdoors. He returned to Tallinn in 1934, was given a studio in the newly opened Art Hall and showed his Greek landscapes there. In 1936 he married Mari Adamson; that year he also had a solo exhibition at the Strindberg gallery in Helsinki, and the Finnish government bought “Winter Tallinn” (1935). In 1937, at the World’s Fair in Paris, he received two diplomas of honour for carpets, porcelain and ceramics, and in 1938 in Berlin a medal for leatherwork. At that time he also took up metalwork, ceramics and porcelain painting, and designed carpets. The “Cave Dweller Service” of 1937 is in the Art Museum of Estonia. The exhibitions of 1938–1939 in Tallinn and Stockholm showed him working both as a painter and as an applied artist.

During the war he was evacuated to the Soviet rear. In 1942 he became chief artist of the State Ensembles of the Estonian SSR in Kuibyshev, then in Yaroslavl, and in 1943 he received the title of Honoured Art Worker. He took part in organising an exhibition in Moscow marking the 600th anniversary of the St George’s Night Uprising. After the war he headed the Artists’ Union of the Estonian SSR, took part in founding the Ars combine, and became director of the Tallinn State Institute of Applied Arts (1945–1949).

In April 1949, at a meeting of artists, his work was denounced as formalism (a charge in Soviet cultural policy against art judged too concerned with form), and in 1950 a plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Estonia expelled him from the party and from the Artists’ Union. He lost his title and his studio, and in 1951–1953 he worked at a shoe factory. From 1953 until the end of his life he taught at the State Art Institute of the Estonian SSR, including leather craft.

In 1955 he was paralysed on the right side, and later he painted with his left hand. It seems to me that his late flowers, still lifes and small landscapes matter more than much of the prewar work, but it is hard to judge: many of them became known only after his death. In his last years he made decorative plaques with glaze and a series of panels for the Tallinn café.

His solo exhibitions of 1962 in Tallinn and Moscow comprised more than 900 works. He died on 2 December 1968 in Tallinn and is buried in the Forest Cemetery. In 1983 his museum opened on Lühike jalg Street: his widow, Mari Adamson, a professor of textiles, gave the Art Museum of Estonia more than a thousand works.