Karl Pärsimägi

Biography

In 1941 the Gestapo arrested Karl Pärsimägi in Paris. He was sent to the Drancy internment camp, and from there to Auschwitz. The reason for the arrest is unknown. He was not Jewish; several guesses are made, and none is confirmed by documents.

He was born on 11 May 1902 (28 April, Old Style) in Oe, in the Võru region, in Antsla Parish, on the Sika farm, into the family of a well-off farmer. In 1919 he took part in the Estonian War of Independence and was awarded a medal. After the war, against his father’s wishes, he went to Tartu and enrolled at the newly opened art school of the Pallas society, which was known for promoting modern art. His teachers there were Konrad Mägi, Nikolai Triik and Ado Vabbe. Besides Fauvism, Estonian folk art influenced him. In the spring and summer of 1923 he went on a study trip through Germany led by Anton Starkopf, and that same year his first exhibition was held. He interrupted his studies several times to go back to the farm and paint landscapes.

In the mid-1930s he turned to woodcut and made brightly coloured monotypes, although he remained mainly a painter.

In 1937 the newspaper Postimees reported that four Tartu artists, Pärsimägi among them, were going to Paris for a month. He seems to have intended from the start to stay longer. His father, finally reconciled to his son’s choice, helped him with money. By one account he studied at the Académie Colarossi, by another at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where he earned extra money as a stoker. Money was short, but he worked intensely. The late Matisse and Cézanne strongly influenced him, and in Tartu he was called the “Tartu Matisse”. His watercolours of Paris, showing its famous sights, are painted in soft, pale tones and differ sharply from his canvases, which are dense in line and colour. He later sent a series of sheets from a single pad home, to share his impressions of the city with his family.

In 1939 an exhibition of six artists opened at the Tallinn Art Hall from 8 to 18 September: Adamson-Eric, Aleksander Bergmann-Vardi, Jaan Grünberg, Kaarel Liimand, Karl Pärsimägi and Kristjan Teder. For Pärsimägi it was the first detailed account of what he had done.

When the Second World War began, most Baltic artists went home. He stayed. Sources differ: by one account he deliberately refused to return to Estonia, by then Soviet, by another he tried to return but did not manage it. The art historian Mai Levin named Soviet citizenship as a possible reason for the arrest, since Germany regarded the USSR as a hostile state. Other suggestions are helping a Jewish friend, taking part in the French Resistance, and sexual orientation. This is hard to verify, and I would not choose between them.

He was executed on 27 July 1942 at Auschwitz (Birkenau).

The body of work he left is large: in the catalogue of the 1966 exhibition Eha Ratnik counted more than five hundred works, among them paintings, watercolours, drawings, monotypes and woodcuts. In the Soviet Union he was not recognised, partly because of his support for Estonian independence. Interest in him returned after 1991. An exhibition marked the centenary of his birth, and many of his works are held by the Tartu Art Museum. In 2003 Heie Treier published a book about him, “Pärsimägi. Võrumaa–Tartu–Paris”.