Konrad Mägi

Konrad Vilhelm Mägi (1 November 1878 – 15 August 1925) was one of the first modernist painters in Estonia and the Nordic countries, at the core of whose creative legacy are visionary landscapes. He only worked for sixteen years, yet the total volume of his oeuvre is estimated to be around 400 paintings.

Numerous exhibitions of his works have been held in Estonia, and in recent years, his art has been discovered in Europe: in 2017, there was a solo exhibition of Konrad Mägi’s paintings in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome; in 2018, his works were displayed at the exhibition ''[https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/exhibitions/wild-souls-symbolism-baltic-states-196086 Wild Souls: Symbolism in the Art Of the Baltic States]'' in the Orsay Museum; in 2021, more than a hundred of Mägi’s works were exhibited in the EMMA Museum in Espoo, and in 2022, the same works were displayed in the Lillehammer Art Museum.

Konrad Mägi’s works are particularly appreciated for their vigorous and impulsive colours and a pantheistic approach to nature, making him unique in European early-20th-century modernism. Mägi worked in different parts of Europe, according to which his oeuvre is divided into rather dissimilar chapters: Denmark, Norway, France, the island of Saaremaa, southern Estonia, Italy etc.

The reception of his art went through various periods, too. In the 1920s and 1930s, Konrad Mägi’s oeuvre influenced a large part of Estonian art created at the time. During World War II, his art was condemned (the Soviet authorities ordered his works to be removed from exhibitions, his letters to be destroyed, etc.); it continued to be forbidden until the second half of the 1950s. Towards the end of the 1950s, as political austerity relaxed, Mägi’s oeuvre was “re-introduced” and several retrospectives were held.

Despite the fact that Mägi spent the majority of his life in towns, his oeuvre mainly revolves around landscapes: environments lacking humans, where nature offers irrational, mystical, metaphysical and religious experiences. Konrad Mägi’s oeuvre is rooted in existential tensions that made him yearn for other potential worlds. As a young man he took actively part in the revolutionary movement, but later withdrew completely from politics and focussed entirely on art. “Happiness is not for us, sons of a poor land,” Mägi once wrote. “For us, art is the only way out, because when the soul is filled with the eternal suffering of life, art will provide what life cannot give us. There, in art, in one’s own oeuvre, can one find peace.”

In addition to landscape paintings, Mägi painted portraits (including several portraits of members of the women’s movement) and still-lifes. He was the first director of Pallas, the first Estonian higher art school.

Konrad Mägi’s health seriously troubled him throughout his creative career: various illnesses led to a rapid deterioration of his health in the 1920s. Konrad Mägi was only 46 years old when he died. The whereabouts of more than half of his works are still unknown. Provided by Wikipedia