Nikolai Triik

Biography

The first drawings by Nikolai Triik to reach print were political caricatures of 1905 for Estonian satirical magazines.

He was born on 7 August 1884 (26 July, Old Style) in Reval (now Tallinn), the first child in a tailor’s family. He finished the town school in 1901 and in the same year entered the Stieglitz School of Technical Drawing in Saint Petersburg. In 1905 he was expelled for taking part in a student strike. His studies continued in Tallinn, in the studio of Ants Laikmaa, and from the beginning of 1906 in Saint Petersburg with Osip Braz.

In the spring of 1906 Triik went to Helsinki, spent the summer on the Åland Islands with Konrad Mägi and Aleksander Tassa, and in the autumn studied briefly at the school of the Finnish Art Association. At the end of the year he moved to Paris, where he worked at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie Julian and, in 1907–1908, in Gabriel Ferrier’s section of the École des Beaux-Arts. In the summers of 1907 and 1908 he travelled to Norway, where other Estonian artists from the Paris colony were also going at the time. The result was “Decorative Norwegian Landscape” (1908); in their generalised forms and decorative treatment these works recall Edvard Munch. In the autumn of 1908 he returned to Saint Petersburg and, as an auditor, studied under Nicholas Roerich at the school of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, while with a professor of printmaking at the Academy of Arts he learned graphic techniques. Until 1910 Triik lived now in Saint Petersburg, now in Tartu. He collected folk art for the Estonian National Museum, helped to organise the second survey exhibition of Estonian art in 1910 and made the sketch for its poster himself. From 1905 he designed publications of the literary society Noor-Eesti (Young Estonia): he made the covers of the first and third albums, and in 1910–1911 he headed the magazine’s art section. In 1909–1910 came compositions in the spirit of national romanticism on subjects from folk legend: “Going to War”, “Lennuk” and “Struggle”. Then he travelled to Copenhagen and Berlin. In Berlin in 1913 he met Laikmaa, who was returning from North Africa, and painted his portrait.

After that the portrait became his main subject. To my mind, Triik’s best work is not the pictures on themes from legend but the faces: the charcoal Juhan Liiv (1909), Mihkel Martna (1912), Laikmaa in oils (1913), the portraits of Mrs Lüüs (1917). In 1926–1934 he made a series of charcoal and sanguine drawings of well-known public figures, among them Anton Hansen Tammsaare, Gustav Suits and Friedebert Tuglas. His manner gradually became more expressive, as the prints “The Birth of Freedom” (1919) and “The Howling Dog” (1921) show. After the criticism at the survey exhibition of 1919, researchers write, the range of his subjects narrowed somewhat. In the 1930s he painted landscapes of Saaremaa, Rutja and Leetse-Lepik: solitary groups of pines, empty stretches of shore with the sea, winter views of Tartu.

He settled in Estonia for good in 1913 and taught in Tallinn at the courses of the Estonian Art Society, from 1914 at the Tallinn School of Art and Industry, and at several general schools. From 1916 he sat on the council of the Estonian Art Society, and in 1919–1920 he headed the fine arts commission at the Ministry of Education. In the Estonian War of Independence he served in a battalion of schoolteachers.

From 1920 Triik belonged to the Pallas art association, from 1921 he lived in Tartu, and in 1922–1926 he ran the school’s painting studio there, occasionally teaching printmaking. In 1924–1925, while Mägi was ill, he served as acting director. Then he worked for two years in Tallinn as a freelance artist, and in 1928 he returned to Pallas, first as a teacher of printmaking and from 1929 as head of the painting studio. In 1933 he received the title of professor, the first Estonian to do so.

In February 1940 Triik retired and moved to Tallinn to stay with relatives. He died there on 12 August 1940. He is buried in the Evald family cemetery at Leetse-Lepik on the Pakri Peninsula.