This afternoon Cid and I took a short walk to the KUMU Art Museum. It was exciting to realize that the museum is just out the back door and down the street a ten minute walk. The walk, at least on a brilliantly sunny day like today, was really pleasant and culminated at a very nicely designed early 2000’s building at the edge of Kadriorg Park. The museum houses a permanent collection of Estonian works and a couple halls of changing exhibitions. The brochure says that they show documentary films every Wednesday night and they have a nice café with wifi, snacks, and draft beer, for when I can’t stand writing while looking out the back window any longer.

What they call the Treasury traces a timeline similar to what Cid and I saw at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C, that is, Eighteenth Century portraiture to interwar modernism. The D.C. Gallery mostly leaves modernism and much of its post, post, posts, to other museums on the Capital Mall, but it is easy to create an imagined dialog between the two. It was interesting to see the conversation between Estonian artists and other Europeans at the same periods.



I include colonial folk portraitists in the label European with only a slight wince, but either by curation, or engendered by a global economy of artistic ideas, there were clear connections to be made. There was a 1920’s landscape with color choices that reminded me of the classic golden rolling hills of California work of the same period and the connections to the Vienna Secession of 1900 was also clear. Maybe Estonians are too polite to include Kokoshka style portraiture but the curators did explicitly articulate a Kandinsky connection.

This is not to say that the Estonians are peripheral to broader artistic movements, and in the contemporary shows we saw clear evidence of exciting new invention. In fact, there was too much to see in the museum in one visit, and Cid and I were encouraged about the kind of artistic creativity going on here.

We skipped the 4th floor of works from the era of Soviet dominance, not because they weren’t interesting, but because our eyes felt full after seeing the first half of the permanent collection, and the Edward Wiralt exhibition – drawings, etchings, and woodblock prints with a degree of technical proficiency that was really inspiring – and the 5th floor contemporary exhibition.


Cid was particularly taken with the work of Marko Maetamm, whose work is very serious, but is also sometimes laugh out loud funny. Bits of his work remind us of Margaret Kilgalen’s work, and some of the Super Flat stuff we have seen, but really it is totally different.


















We also like a sculpture/sound installation by Villu Jaanisoo. Rebar sunflower stalks and speakerblossoms pouring out waves of splashy wave sound. Really nicely done.

Okay, I think that is more than enough for today.