Kārlis Zāle

Biography

The Freedom Monument in Riga was unveiled on 18 November 1935. Three days earlier its sculptor had been awarded the Order of the Three Stars, Second Class.

Kārlis Zāle was born on 28 October 1888 in Mažeikiai, in the Kovno Governorate, into the family of a bricklayer, Fricis Zālīte. He spent his school years in Liepāja. There he attended evening courses in drawing, modelling and painting at the city school, and an older friend, Ernests Štālbergs, his future collaborator, helped him prepare for entry to an art school. In 1909 Zāle began studying at the Kazan Art School and graduated in 1913. Later he worked in Moscow in the studio of Stepan Erzia.

In 1915 he came to Petrograd and entered the School of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, which he finished the same year. In 1917 he began studying at the former Academy of Arts, by then reorganised as Vkhutein, the state art school in Petrograd (by some accounts at first as an auditor), and completed the course in 1920 in the class of the sculptor Alexander Matveyev. He also attended the Free Art Studios. In those years, together with Štālbergs, who was already teaching at Vkhutein, he took part in carrying out the plan of monumental propaganda, the Soviet project of new public monuments for the cities of Soviet Russia. For Petrograd he made a monument to Nikolai Dobrolyubov by the Tuchkov Bridge (1918) and one to Giuseppe Garibaldi (1919). Both were made of impermanent materials; the Dobrolyubov was destroyed by the flood of 1924. In 1919 Zāle also worked on a sketch for a monument to the fighters of the revolution in Riga.

In 1921 he travelled to Berlin and saw the flowering of Expressionism there, and in sculpture of Constructivism.

In 1923, at the invitation of the government of Latvia, by then an independent state, he returned to Riga together with other artists of Latvian origin: Rihards Zariņš, Teodors Zaļkalns, Kārlis Miesnieks and Štālbergs. He became one of the founders of the artists’ association Sadarbs. From 1924 he worked on the memorial ensemble of the Brothers’ Cemetery in Riga with the architects Aleksandrs Birzenieks and Pēteris Feders and the landscape architect Andrejs Zeidaks; the ensemble was opened in 1936. For the sculptures they chose Allaži limestone tuff. The first to be finished, in 1927, was the figure of the Wounded Rider; the following year Zāle began the second rider and the central figure, Mother Latvia, who blesses the fallen soldiers. A nine-metre wall was decorated with the coats of arms of Latvia’s towns and districts. Beside it stand four figures of warriors personifying Kurzeme, Zemgale, Latgale and Vidzeme. In the middle of the ensemble is the high relief “Fallen Brothers”. It seems to me that this ensemble still shows best how Zāle reworked the forms of national romanticism and Art Nouveau.

Thirty-two proposals were submitted for the Freedom Monument competition. Three authors were chosen from them: Zāle, Zaļkalns and Kārlis Zemdega. Zāle was selected, and he began work with Štālbergs. Construction started in 1931 and was paid for largely by public donations. The monument is 42 metres high. On the south-west side stands Mother Latvia holding the shield of freedom; working from Zāle’s model, a Swedish model-maker, Ragnar Myrsmeden, carried this figure out in the final material, and in Riga she is called Milda. On the east side is a chained hero breaking his chains. The north relief is devoted to the events of 13 January 1905 and shows a horseman with a whip. Other reliefs show the Latvian Riflemen and the fighting against Bermondt’s forces in 1919, and Lāčplēsis tearing open a bear’s jaws. The sculptures are made of Italian travertine, Allaži tuff, sandstone and Finnish granite.

Among Zāle’s other works are the gravestone of Andrejs Pumpurs, a bust of Rainis for the National Theatre (1927), the freedom monument at Jaunpiebalga, the compositions “To the Fight” (1931) and “The Fisherman” (1939), and the memorial “Sudrabkalniņš” to the riflemen of the Riga 6th Regiment (1937, architect Štālbergs). From 1936 to 1940 and from 1941 to 1942 he headed the sculpture studio of the Latvian Academy of Art; among his pupils was Jānis Zariņš. Until 1938 he lived and worked in Riga on Satekles Street.

Zāle died on 19 February 1942 in Inčukalns, at that time in the territory of Reichskommissariat Ostland. He is buried in Riga, on the central axis of the Brothers’ Cemetery, whose ensemble he had worked on from 1924 to 1936.