Hilda Vīka

Biography

In 1950 Hilda Vīka was expelled from the Artists’ Union of the Latvian SSR “for remnants of formalism in her work”. It was seven years before she was taken back.

She was born in Riga on 5 November 1897 and was baptised Hildegarde Natālija. Her father, Otto Vīka, died when she was seven; she spent part of her childhood with her mother’s parents near Dobele, and returned to Riga when her mother remarried. Her mother came of a German family, so the girl was sent to a German girls’ school. During the First World War Vīka was among the refugees: she worked as an educator and a maid in Russia, Poland and Lithuania, served as an assistant nurse and completed a course in accounting. She came back to Latvia in 1918. From 1918 to 1935 she worked as a clerk, including at a bank. She gave her free time to art studies: she attended the People’s University (1920–1922), then the private studios of Romans Suta, Augusts Zauers (1922–1925) and Uga Skulme (1925–1927). From 1927 her work was shown in exhibitions; from 1927 to 1938 she belonged to the Association of Independent Artists, and she also exhibited with the Green Crow group.

Her first solo exhibition was held in 1933 at the Riga City Art Museum, followed by others in 1937, 1940 and 1943. Her work was also shown abroad: in Königsberg in 1932, and in Warsaw and Helsinki in 1936.

In the 1930s and 1940s she painted, in watercolour and oil, scenes of everyday life and dreamlike visions, usually with women at the centre. The figures are stylised, the compositions built on geometric ornament; the manner is close to Art Deco. Among her oils there are many landscapes of Ķīpsala, where she had spent her childhood. From the early 1930s Latvian mythology appeared in her pictures: Vīka had joined Dievturība, a movement reviving pre-Christian Latvian beliefs. There are many self-portraits, among them “Self-Portrait” (1934).

She also wrote. She made her debut as a poet in a literary almanac in 1924, and her first collection, “Spožie ūdeņi” (“Bright Waters”), came out in 1932. Collections of poetry followed, “Mēnesnīca” (“Moonlight”, 1935) and “Zelta briedis” (“The Golden Stag”, 1944), together with books of short stories and novels, among them “Lielā slāpe” (“The Great Thirst”, 1940) and “Laimīgā dziesma” (“The Happy Song”, 1942). She illustrated her books herself.

On 20 December 1930 Vīka married the writer Viktors Eglītis, who was twenty years her senior; the wedding was held according to the Dievturi rite. Eglītis was arrested in 1944 and died in a Soviet prison in April 1945; by some accounts he was killed on 20 April 1945, by others he was arrested while trying to preserve her paintings.

After the war she adapted her manner to the demands of socialist realism, the official Soviet doctrine in the arts, but this did not save her from expulsion from the Union. She lived in poverty, working in Riga in winter and in Dobele in summer. In 1952 she was granted second-group disability status. Solo exhibitions resumed only after 1959: in Riga in 1959 and 1960, in Dobele in 1960.

Hilda Vīka died in Riga on 14 February 1963 and was buried in Meža Cemetery. Her works are held by the Latvian National Museum of Art, by the Dobele History Museum (more than ninety) and in private collections. A street in Dobele is named after her.