Romans Suta

Biography

On 14 July 1944 the Latvian artist Romans Suta was shot in Tbilisi. He was rehabilitated, that is, officially cleared of the charges, only in 1959, and the document was received in Riga by his daughter Tatjana.

He was born on 28 April 1896 in Dzērbene parish, Wenden district, the son of Jēkabs Suta, who owned a small shop. According to family tradition, his mother gave birth to him on the road, travelling from Cēsis to Kleķerkrogs. His childhood was spent in Valka, where his father kept a shop. He studied at the Realschule (secondary school) in Pskov, and in 1910 ran away to Riga with his brother; for about a year the brothers worked as cabin boys on merchant ships. He took his school-leaving certificate as an external student.

In 1913, following his sister Lūcija, he went to the private studio of Jūlijs Madernieks, and then entered the Riga City Art School, where he studied under Vilhelms Purvītis and Jānis Tilbergs. There he became close to Jēkabs Kazaks, one of the first Latvian modernists. In 1915 his family was evacuated to Petrograd, and Suta had to continue his studies at the art school in Penza, which he finished in 1917. In Penza he met the future Latvian painters Konrāds Ubāns and Voldemārs Tone, and his future wife, the painter Aleksandra Beļcova. In August 1917 he joined the 5th Zemgale Latvian Rifle Regiment as a volunteer, together with Kazaks. The October days found him in Petrograd, where he met Nathan Altman and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. In December he returned to Latvia.

In 1919 Suta joined a group of Expressionist artists, out of which the Riga Artists’ Group grew in 1920; he remained in it until 1926. In the same year, 1919, he worked with Otto Skulme on the May Day decorations for Riga. In 1922–1923 he travelled with Beļcova, supported by a grant from the Latvian Cultural Fund, through Berlin and Dresden to Paris. Their daughter was born there, and he made the acquaintance of Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier. After their return the couple began to introduce the Latvian public to Cubism and Constructivism.

In December 1924, on Suta’s initiative, the porcelain-painting workshop Baltars opened (from the Latin ars Baltica, “Baltic art”). A year later, at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, he received a gold medal for his ideas of a national constructivism and a bronze one for porcelain painting. In 1926, after disagreements, he and the other Baltars artists left the Riga Artists’ Group, and he began to show with the association Zaļā Vārna (the Green Crow). In 1926 he also took part in founding the Latvia–USSR society. Baltars, for financial reasons, closed at the end of 1928.

From 1929 to 1934 Suta ran the drawing and painting studio at the Riga People’s University, and then, until 1940, a private studio. Judging by his articles in the periodicals of the time, teaching went hand in hand with theory. In 1931–1940 he was chief artist of the Kuznetsov porcelain and faience factory in Riga and of the Ilguciems glassworks, designing shapes and cut patterns for crystal. In 1935 he was awarded a silver medal in Brussels for Kuznetsov ceramics, and in 1937 in Paris the crystal of the Ilguciems factory won the Grand Prix. In the same year he was chief artist of the Latvian pavilions at the Paris exhibition, and in 1939 he designed a pavilion at the Leipzig Fair. For the Latvian Opera in 1933 he made sets and costumes for Anatols Vilcaks’s ballet “Pulcinella”.

Of his paintings, the ones most often named are “Church” (1917), “Self-Portrait with a Pipe” (1919), “Trench Soldiers” (1920), “Harlequin with a Guitar” (1923), “Jānis Plase with a Female Friend” (1927) and “The Hippodrome” (1933). After his first Modernist experiments he turned to a more realistic manner. A solo exhibition was held in Riga in 1928, jointly with Beļcova. His work was shown in Berlin, Paris, New York, Stockholm, Oslo, Leningrad and Moscow.

After Latvia’s incorporation into the USSR in 1940 he became a production designer at the Riga Film Studio and chief artist of the film “Kaugurieši” (“The Kauguri Uprising”), in which he also played a small part as a church sexton. In late June 1941, while working on a film about the composer Emīls Dārziņš, he received an order to evacuate with the film crew. He lived in Moscow, then in Alma-Ata, and finally in Tbilisi, where he worked at the Gruzia-Film studio. In 1943 he was arrested on a charge of forging bread coupons.

The writer Chabua Amirejibi later recalled that Suta belonged to an underground group and printed counterfeit coupons to raise money for its activities. I have found no confirmation of this in other sources. After a closed trial Suta was shot.

In 2008 a museum with works by both artists opened in Riga, in the former flat of Suta and Beļcova on Elizabetes Street.