Eduard Wiiralt

Biography

In December 1918 a twenty-year-old pupil of the Tallinn School of Applied Art (then called Reval) enlisted as a volunteer in the schoolboys’ battalion and was assigned to the landing party of an armoured train. The War of Independence had begun. Eduard Wiiralt stayed at the front until March 1919, then did guard duty and was demobilised only in the spring of 1920.

He was born on 20 March 1898 (8 March, Old Style) in Kalitino, in Tsarskoselsky Uyezd of Saint Petersburg Governorate, to Anton and Sophie-Elisabeth Wiiralt, Estonian servants on an estate. In 1909 the family moved to Estonia: his father found a job at the Varangu estate in Järva County. His parents wanted their son to become an office clerk and sent him to a private German school in Koeru. After the First World War began, the family moved to Tallinn, and Eduard chose the Tallinn School of Applied Art. He was a gifted pupil and completed two classes in one year. His main teacher was Nikolai Triik. His first linocuts date from 1916 and his first experiments in etching from 1917. There was no etching press in Estonia at the time, and he went to a lithographer in Nõmme to pull his impressions. He did not manage to finish the school because of the German occupation, which began in February 1918.

When the Pallas art school opened in Tartu in the autumn of 1919, Wiiralt asked to be transferred to the Tartu schoolboys’ battalion, and from December, still a soldier, he studied in the evenings. He studied sculpture under Anton Starkopf: there was as yet no teacher of graphic art at the school, and the class was opened only in October 1921. In 1922–1923 he continued his studies at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts under Professor Selmar Werner, as a Pallas scholarship holder. There he tried various intaglio techniques and, for the first time, lithography; he spent hours drawing lions, tigers and hippopotamuses at the zoo, and when the scholarship ran out he stayed on until the autumn and worked as a printer of copper engravings. That practice was, in effect, the only technical schooling he ever received. His Dresden prints show the influence of Verism, and in places they look very much like the work of Otto Dix.

In May 1924, at the exhibition of the first graduating class of Pallas, he showed 114 works, including three sculpted portraits, and received diploma no. 1. For two semesters he taught graphic techniques at the school, and in 1925 the Fine Arts Endowment of the Estonian Cultural Endowment awarded him a one-year scholarship for Paris. The travel money, so the story goes, he spent with friends in Tallinn, and the scholarship had to be awarded again, on condition that he spend six months abroad. He arrived in Paris on 8 November 1925.

He stayed there for fourteen years. The first winter was a poor one; he painted silk scarves and coloured dolls. In May 1927 he held a solo exhibition of about forty lithographs, woodcuts, etchings, monotypes and drawings. The works sold well, that same year he was elected a member of the Salon d’Automne, and the publisher Éditions du Trianon began commissioning illustrations from him. He was one of their own in the Estonian colony in Montparnasse, and he was especially close to Jaan Grünberg. Between 1930 and 1932 he made “Hell” (an etching and copper engraving), in 1931 “Cabaret”, in 1932 the lithograph “The Preacher”, and later “Heads of Negroes” (1933) and “Sleeping Tiger” (1937). He returned all his life to what he called “fantastic portraits”, grotesque generalisations of human types and vices. He had never been to Estonia before the war, but his work was shown at exhibitions of Estonian art in Riga, Helsinki, Berlin, Moscow, Kaunas and Prague. A large exhibition in Tallinn and Tartu in 1936, of about 350 prints, gave his compatriots their first real idea of him. At the end of 1937, at the annual exhibition in the Künstlerhaus (the artists’ house) in Vienna, he took part as the only foreigner and won a gold medal: of 21 works shown, 13 were sold.

From July 1938 to February 1939 he lived and worked in Marrakesh. Portraits of Berbers and Arabs date from that stay, and he went back to his Moroccan impressions later in Paris and in Estonia: “Young Arab Boy” and “Berber Girl with a Camel” (both 1940). In September 1939, immediately after the Second World War began, Wiiralt returned to Estonia and took a post as art consultant at the State Printing House. His first work after the return was a portrait of the artist Kristjan Raud. There he lived through the first Soviet occupation and the German one, and in 1943 he made “Viljandi Landscape” and “Virve”.

In the spring of 1944 he travelled to Vienna to arrange an exhibition. The Albertina bought several works. He did not go back: by way of Denmark he reached Sweden, lived in a refugee camp at Kummelnäs and spent about a year in the country, going on a hiking trip to Lapland with Eduard Ole. In the autumn of 1946 he returned to Paris for good. The printing plates he had left with the printer Taneur in 1939 he received back from the printer’s widow, and he at once began pulling new impressions; from 1947 he had some of the plates electroplated so that they would stand a larger print run, since demand among Estonians abroad was great. In 1946–1953 he produced on average four prints a year. Among his late works are “Poet Speaking to the Stones” (1948), “Family of Lions” (1949), “Restlessness” (1950–1952) and “Zebra” (1953). At the 1949 Salon d’Automne the French state bought his print “Head of a Camel” (1939) for the national library. From 1951 he lived in the suburb of Sceaux.

Wiiralt died in Paris on 8 January 1954, aged 55. He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery on 12 January.

His archive and plates were sent to Stockholm, into the care of the Estonian Committee, and in 2005 the main part of the legacy was transferred to the Art Museum of Estonia. Its collection of his graphic work now numbers about 3,300 items. Since 1996 a Wiiralt gallery has operated in the building of the National Library of Estonia.