LATVIAN CUBISM

Of the Classical Modernism movements, it was Cubism that had the most evident and wide-ranging influence on Latvian early 20th century painting. Classical Cubism is considered to last from 1907 up to 1921, but in Latvia the earliest examples of Cubism appear much later than in Western Europe – only around 1918. In other European countries, familiarity with Cubism was more readily obtainable, by living in Paris and studying under the direct tuition of French artists. But Cubism reached the minds of Latvians only during the time of the First World War. The powerful influence of French Cubism cannot be denied, but Latvians managed to create a local version, which stylistically was a unification of the synthetic stage of basic principles, but each artist found an adequately individual interpretation. A significant feature of Latvian Cubism is that many young artists reached this movement not as the result of a prolonged search for form and means of expression, but rather actually began their creative work with geometrisation. But their work is on a professionally high level, and it has come to represent one of the most vivid episodes in Latvian art history at the present day.