Konrad Mägi

Biography

In 1897 Konrad Mägi was working in Tartu at the Bandelier furniture factory, turning complicated rosettes and volutes. The owners wanted to improve the quality of their products and sent their workers to drawing classes given by Rudolf von zur Mühlen. It was probably there that he first came close to painting.

He was born on 1 November 1878 in Hellenurme, near Tartu (then Dorpat), the youngest child of Andres Mägi, an estate manager. His childhood was spent in the village of Uderna near Elva, among large forests and next to a railway line. He attended the village school for barely a few months. When the family broke up, the eleven-year-old Konrad moved to Tartu with his mother and sister. He left the Orthodox parish school after a couple of months, did not finish the municipal school, and became a carpenter’s apprentice at a furniture factory. A few furniture designs from that time have survived. With his friends he took up physical culture and sport, and was interested in theatre, literature, philosophy and classical music.

In January 1903 Mägi arrived in St Petersburg, at the Stieglitz School of Technical Drawing, where he studied sculpture under Amandus Adamson. There he met Nikolai Triik and other Estonian artists. The dry, technical approach to drawing did not suit him, and when the sculpture department was closed, his interest in his studies faded. He went around the museums, and what interested him most was the work of Mikhail Vrubel and Nicholas Roerich.

In 1905 he took part in the revolutionary events: according to tradition, he staged provocations in churches and helped to hide weapons, and he sent satirical drawings with a symbolic undertone to Estonian political publications. He took part in a student strike at the school and was expelled. For a time he studied in the studio of Jakob Goldblatt and gave drawing lessons, and in April 1906 he left St Petersburg.

He was twenty-seven and had not finished a single work. He spent the summer of 1906 with friends on the Åland Islands, and there, following Triik’s example, he picked up a brush for the first time. The studies in his rented room have not survived; one painting is known from the Åland period, and it has little in common with his later manner. From then on he lived in town and painted in the countryside. In September 1906 Mägi moved to Helsinki and studied briefly at the Ateneum drawing school, and gave private lessons to Anni and August Vesanto, who became his friends and patrons. Anni sold his watercolours in her tobacco shop, but the income was negligible. He lived mainly by copying out Estonian folk songs, and at the end of August 1907, having saved some money, he left for Paris.

In Paris he first lived with the sculptor Jaan Koort, then in the artists’ colony La Ruche, and studied drawing at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He went to exhibitions, but modern art did not captivate him. Whether he painted at that time is unknown: he complained that his money went on tobacco and paper, and any works he made have been lost. In the spring of 1908 Triik persuaded him to spend the summer in Norway, and in August Mägi settled in a village. He meant to stay a couple of months, to prepare for the entrance examinations of the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris, but he had no money to leave, and he stayed for two years.

In Norway he began to paint in earnest. He did not date his works or name the place of the motif: he wanted to set appearances aside and catch the rhythms and structures that make up the essence of things. His Norwegian landscapes include both panoramic, quite realistic views and almost hallucinatory bogs. An exhibition at the Blomqvist Gallery in Oslo brought no breakthrough, but the pictures he sent in 1910 to an exhibition of the literary group Noor-Eesti (Young Estonia) marked the beginning of his reputation at home.

In 1910 he returned to Paris, went to Normandy in the summer and painted again. Three of his works were shown at the Salon des Indépendants in 1912. Suffering from depression, he left for Estonia in the spring of 1912.

He settled in Tartu with his sister. From 1913 he painted portraits to commission, mostly of ladies from well-off circles, and he himself asked people of other nationalities to pose: Jews, Roma, Poles. In the summer of 1913 he went to Saaremaa, working chiefly on the small island of Vilsandi. He worked fast and in one place; his brushwork became denser and more intense than in Norway, and the pictures were built of small dots of colour and gave a rather abstract impression. Estonian landscape had not been depicted by the means of modern art before. The number of his Saaremaa works is unknown. In the following years he lived in Tartu and spent his summers in southern Estonia: in Kasaritsa, by Lake Pühajärv, in Otepää. By the mid-1910s his landscapes had darkened, with walls of trees and ominous skies. It was then that he began to teach drawing and painting, and at the end of the decade he and his colleagues founded the art school Pallas, of which he became the first director.

For almost ten years he did not leave Estonia, and in September 1921 he went to Italy. For the first time urban motifs appeared in his work: buildings, stairs, architectural details, seen as an illusion. In the summer of 1922 in Rome he painted surprisingly few views of the city, more water and sky, reducing the city to a narrow strip in the distance. He also worked on Capri and in Venice. After returning to Tartu he taught still life and landscape.

In 1924 he went to Germany for treatment, and in 1925 he came back to Estonia. He died in Tartu on 15 August 1925, aged forty-six, and was buried in the Old St Peter’s Cemetery.

He kept no records of his work during his lifetime. 290 paintings are documented; the figure of four hundred remains an estimate. After his death an inventory of his apartment listed 88 paintings, 60 watercolours, 16 coloured drawings and 242 drawings. Some works were destroyed, among them in the bombing of Tartu in July 1941, and in his last years, it is said, he spoiled his own canvases. In the Soviet period, under a ban that lasted until the second half of the 1950s, his pictures were removed from exhibitions. In 2018 the Konrad Mägi Foundation was created to search for the missing works; about forty have been found.