Wandering the Streets: Urban Visions of Latvian Modernists
The exhibition “Wandering the Streets: Urban Visions of Latvian Modernists" will offer an insight into the relationship between the city, literature, and art in the first decades of the 20th century. This was a time when Latvian and European culture was undergoing rapid change. The exhibition will trace the experiences of Latvian poets and artists in three important cities - Riga, Berlin, and Paris. They were flâneurs and flâneuses - leisurely observers of the city, documenting modern architecture, traffic, advertisements, shop windows, sounds, and rhythms in texts and images. Visitors will walk among the exhibits, feeling the era's mood and learning its visual language. The exhibition will offer both chrestomathic and lesser-known works of art, poetic texts, and original and facsimiles of books, photographs, drawings, and videos. Alongside the metropolises of the time, Berlin and Paris, Riga was also a powerful inspiration for the work of Latvian modernist artists, writers, and thinkers.
Latvian culture in the 1920s and 1930s was enriched by and became part of the flow of European modernism. Before the First World War, the artists Gustavs Šķilters and Jāzeps Grosvalds had already walked the streets of Paris; after the war, their footsteps were followed by the young members of the Riga Artists Group and writers, who rushed to share their experiences in both their writings and their artworks. Andrejs Kurcijs composed a cycle of poems called "The Barbarian in Paris." At the same time, Lūcija Zamaiča sold her parents' house in Latvia so that she could live in the capital of France for a few years and travel to other parts of Europe and North Africa.
Berlin captivated both the writer Linards Laicens, who dedicated odes to its bustle and machinery, and the sculptor Kārlis Zāle, who, together with his apprentice Arnolds Dzirkalis and Andrejs Kurcijs, published the first Latvian modern art magazine "Laikmets." Depictions of the urban environment range from the brightly lit Parisian night views painted by Ludolfs Liberts and the city crowd scenes of Jānis Tīdemanis to the ghostly world of Riga’s outlying workers, slobs, and walkers in the poetry of Aleksandrs Čaks and Austra Skujiņa, the poignant graphics of dandy Kārlis Padegs and the surreal description of the Daugava riverside market in Walter Benjamin’s notes. The exhibition's combination of literature and art highlights the era's social and cultural changes, revealing how Latvian poets and artists reflected and interpreted the dynamics of the urban environment.
The title "Wandering the Streets" is taken from Lūcija Zamaiča's 1923 collection of poems.
The exhibition is being created in collaboration with the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia as the conclusion of the project “Walking Through Time: Flânerie and Modernity in Latvian Interwar Culture", project No. lzp-2022/1-0505.
Exhibition organized by the Institute of Literature, Folklore, and Art of the University of Latvia and the Latvian National Museum of Art.