Digital texts

For the exhibition "Wandering the Streets: Urban Visions of Latvian Modernists"

At the beginning of the 20th century, European countries experienced rapid industrial, political, and spiritual changes that left an indelible mark on art and literature. New communications and transportation technologies, as well as various ideological forces, were particularly evident in cities. And so, unlike the leisurely strolls or flânerie of the 19th century, people often had to quicken their stride to keep up with the times. The dynamic rhythm of the streets, the glitz of shop windows, and the bustle of cafés became their primary source of inspiration in art and poetry. New phenomena also demanded new forms of expression and new contacts. Latvian modernists enthusiastically engaged in these explorations, both by traveling around Europe and by giving Riga a new look. Even before World War I, Jāzeps Grosvalds roamed the streets of Paris, and later Andrejs Kurcijs dedicated a cycle of poems to this city, joining the ranks of other authors enticed by the art metropolis. Linards Laicens sang about the speed and noise of Berlin in the 1920s, while Kārlis Zāle and his like-minded friends published the first Latvian avant-garde magazine there. Meanwhile, Aleksandrs Čaks and Austra Skujiņa wrote poems about workers, people experiencing poverty, and vagabonds right here in Riga. The German philosopher and avant-garde advocate Walter Benjamin also stayed here for a short time, immortalizing the market on the banks of the Daugava River in his surreal notes. The title of the exhibition, Ielu maldos (Wandering the Streets), is taken from Lūcija Zamaiča’s 1923 collection of poems. The exhibition is based on experiences from three cities – Riga, Berlin, and Paris – and includes works of art and poetry, as well as printed works and photographs.

Team

Concept of the exhibition: Aija Brasliņa, Eva Eglāja-Kristone, Ieva Kalnača, Artis Ostups, Kārlis Vērdiņš
Designer: Dace Džeriņa
Graphic design and video: Mārtiņš Ratniks
Project management: Ieva Kalnača
Exhibition installers: Form Art Lab, Guntis Beijers, Armands Medveckis, Gatis Rudzītis, Erlands Rubins
Large scale printing: Colores Print
Conservation: Inga Rozefelde, Agris Strautmanis, Zane Tuča, Liene Visendorfa
Framing: Arvils Vilkaušs
Sound design and audio recordings: Reinis Semēvics
Image processing: Jānis Pauzers
Communication and education: Kitija Balcare, Anete Brakša, Ingrīda Ivane, Estere Rožkalne, Natalja Sujunšalijeva
Coordination and communication: Lauma Brūvele

Cooperation partners: Latvian National Museum of Literature and Music, Latvian National museum of History, Museum of the History of Riga and Navigation, Aleksandrs Čaks Museum, Ģederts Elianss History and Art Museum of Jelgava, Valmiera Museum, State Archive of Audiovisual Documents of the National Archives of Latvia, National Library of Latvia, Library of the University of Latvia, Latvian Sports Museum, Deutsche Kinemathek (Berlin), The Zuzāns Collection, private collections of Andris Kļaviņš, Valdis Villerušs, and other collectors.

Thanks: Ilze Balode, Māra Brīvere, Marita Bērziņa, Sanita Duka, Ginta Gerharde-Upeniece, Nataļja Jevsejeva, Marija Kaupere, Lauma Lanceniece, Līga Matsone, Līva Ostupe, Zaiga Pleiko, Arnolds Putniņš, Aija Remerte, Ieva Sniedze, Ieva Stūre, Viesturs Škraba, Laura Štokmane-Guillopē, Ilze Tauriņa, Dārta Ungure, Raitis Upens, Martins Vizbulis, Aija Zandersonone, Guna Zelmene

Paris

Since the 19th century, Paris has defined European fashion and style, bringing new ideas to art and literature. In the interwar period, Paris was a long-awaited destination that attracted Latvian artists and writers with its museums and exhibitions, as well as noisy cafes, debauched revue shows, and the stench of gasoline in the bustling streets. There, the famous past coexisted with the anxious present and future, which, as it seemed, was being born right before their eyes.

Berlin

After the First World War, Berlin rapidly became one of the centers of European modernism. Noisy, dazzling, unjust, and frightening, yet also alluring. Determined to express the anxiety of the era in new forms, it also attracted Latvian artists and poets, who went to Berlin to study, gain impressions, and engage in the circulation of modern culture. This experience resonated especially vividly in the modernist fusion of art and life, where everyday rhythms, urban space, and aesthetic explorations formed an inseparable whole.

Riga

During the interwar period, Riga had become the capital of the new Republic of Latvia, where an active metropolitan life took place alongside the traces left by the war. Modernist art and literature advocated a direct and creative depiction of everyday life and the surrounding environment, viewing city landscapes and contemporaries in concrete terms rather than in symbolic generalization. Cinema, cars, and airplanes entered people’s everyday experience. Poets and fiction writers sang of the rapid rhythm of the capital. Workers and poor people lived alongside respectable, wealthy citizens and businesspeople. Emancipated, fashionable women could be seen on the streets. In the evenings, adventure seekers yearned for caresses in the dark corners of the park.

All narcotics and all poisons are sucked intothe hot bodies
like bloodthirsty leeches - and the heart no longer avoids
the black darkness — insane desires grow even to the sky.
Poppies are beautiful for a moment, quickly fall in the wind,
fearful ones; desires themselves burn in their own glow -
ashes remain in the aching grooves of hearts, they barely
breathe in the twisted, once fragrant yews.

/Lūcija Zamaiča/

Where the boulevards intersect,
where cars and trams rush through the flaming night
fast as life —
I saw her:
the tender and fragile
Raphael’s Madonna,
with slender hands and eyes
sad and clear,
the smile of eternity
on her crimson lips.

/Austra Skujiņa/

On the boulevard double-breasted with lamps
and nicely coiffed lindens,
I met a sailor
in shoes of patent leather, two shiny spears,
and with a chest that swelled like a mainsail.

/Aleksandrs Čaks/

On summer evenings, at the beginning of Kaļķu Street between the Reiners cafe and the Old Riga restaurant, young men “march” who hold the thumb of their left hand in the buttonhole of their skirt or coat collar, to notify a passing “aunt” (as those seeking unnatural pleasures are called), that they are free. But the main center around which lovers of vice gather was and still is a kiosk on a corner of the boulevard. They give out addresses and meeting places for the “marchers” with the “aunts”. The main candidates are young men aged 22 or younger, regardless of nationality. The hungriest are said to be some former Baltic German nobles...

Riga “modernizes”. Strādnieku Avīze, November 23, 1924.

One-Way Street

Walter Benjamin

The daily market, a huddling city of low wooden booths, stretches along the jetty, a broad, dirty stone embankment without warehouse buildings, by the waters of the Dvina. Small steamers, often showing no more than their funnels above the quay wall, have put in at the blackish dwarftown. (The larger ships are moored downstream.) Grimy boards are the clay-gray foundation on which, glowing in the cold air, sparse colors melt. At some corners, one can find all year round, alongside huts for fish, meat, boots, and clothes, petty-bourgeois women with the colored paper rods that penetrate as far as the West only at Christmastime. Like being scolded by the most-loved voice: such are these rods. For a few centimes, multicolored chastising switches. At the end of the jetty, fenced off and only thirty paces from the water, are the red-and-white mounds of the apple market. The apples on sale are packed in straw; those sold lie without straw in the housewives’ baskets. A dark-red church rises beyond, outshone in the fresh November air by the cheeks of the apples. — Several shops for boat tackle in small houses near the jetty. Ropes are painted on them. Everywhere you see wares depicted on signboards or on house walls. One shop in the town has cases and belts larger than life on its bare brick walls. A low corner-house with a shop for corsets and millinery is decorated with ladies’ faces, complete with finery, and severe bodices painted on a yellow-ocher ground. Protruding from it at an angle is a lantern with similar pictures on its glass panes. The whole is like the facade of a fantasy brothel. Another house, likewise not far from the harbor, has sugar sacks and coal in gray-and-black relief on a gray wall. Somewhere else, shoes rain from the horns of plenty. Ironmongery is painted in detail — hammers, cogs, pliers, and the tiniest screws on one board that looks like a page from an outmoded child’s painting-book. The town is permeated with such pictures. Between them, however, rise tall, desolate, fortress-like buildings evoking all the terrors of czarism.

Walter Benjamin. One-Way Street, Cambridge (Mass.): The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2016