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Konrad Vilhelm Mägi - Estonia's best known artist - was, by all accounts, a man of restless temperament. Sculpture was his first pursuit, but the closure of the department in St Petersburg sent him adrift through Europe—Helsinki, Paris, Italy—each stop marked by brief enthusiasms and quick disillusion. In 1907, he fetched up at La Ruche in Paris, that fabled hotspot of talent where Modigliani and Chagall also lived. Mägi, however, was less a busy bee than a moth, drawn to too many flames at once.
At twenty‑nine he had completed only a handful of paintings, flitting between Cubism, Pointilism, Art Nouveau, and Expressionism without ever settling into a style of his own. One might charitably call this restlessness; less kindly, dilettantism or a just a willingness to channel every movement he encountered in Paris without ever assimilating it.
His portraits, which even he admitted to disliking, are mostly crude. There was something eternally contrary in him, a man at odds with every movement he encountered, seemingly not out of conviction but temperament. His health, too, was a perpetual problem, probably aggravated by his acute poverty. His least appealing affectation was his Art Nouveau moment, which gives us ugly stylised and lurid treescapes.
What redeems Mägi, if anything, is his pantheistic devotion to landscape. The Norwegian and Estonian countryside, thick with ecstatic colour, coaxed from him a rare clarity. His spell in Norway from 1908-10 in particular produced some pleasing landscapes, including a couple of attractive snowscapes. “When I travelled here I was in pain, but when I saw her wilderness I forgot everything else….she is magnificent”, he wrote.
The exhibition makes a smart pairing with Kristina Ollek’s installation, shown separately in the beautiful Mausoleum. Her cool, contemporary abstraction—part geology, part atmosphere—offers a measured counterpoint to Mägi’s restless intensity. For Dulwich Picture Gallery to give this first British showing to Estonia's finest is an admirable gesture, though one suspects they find him more interesting than likable. Still, this show rewards exactly that kind of open curiousity. And it’s good to think that there is now one Estonian artist that we’ve heard of.
