Goodbye, Franz!

The Latvian National Museum of Art

The Latvian National Museum of Art is closing down for renovation and will be closed for a couple of years, apparently.  So I did a quick tour to see it before it gets spruced up!  The building, on Krišjāņa Valdemāra, the main street that leads to the Shroud Bridge, is a very nice space and dates to 1905, so it really will benefit from renovation -- there was some pretty evident water damage on the walls.

One of my favorite pieces in the museum was this bronze cast of a horse-drawn sleigh carrying the driver and a man and a  child (a father and daughter?)  I loved the movement of the sleeve of the man's coat trailing from the back of the sleigh and a blanket also waving in the air.  It's beautiful.

I also liked some of the ceramic pieces.  There is a chess set called "The Whites and the Reds," that I thought was pretty interesting.  I couldn't find the description of this, but it's pretty obviously from the period around the Russian revolution.  The king of the Whites has a skull-like face and looks like he's brandishing someone's tibia. And the Queen just looks dissolute.  And look at the poor Pawns....  They're in chains!!!

Now, the Reds....  They look happier.  The King is wearing that nice pink apron -- he's a decent working man.  The Queen is fully-clothed and is carrying flowers, and the Pawns look good:  they've got a scythe, but only because they've been out in the fields scything grain. Yay.

But my favorite ceramic piece was this one:  it's called "Goodbye, Franz."  And it says it all.  Looks like Franz and his buddy have gotten too close to a polar bear.  Goodbye, Franz.

On the second floor of the Museum, there are a couple of nice collections of Latvian artists from the early 1900s and through the early 1930s, with some nice landscapes by Purvitis and a couple of beautiful portraits by Rozentals that recall Art Nouveau.  Then suddenly the collection stops (of course.)

In a separate room there was a really interesting collection of Soviet poster art by an artist named Gustav Klucis, who was a member of the famous Latvian Riflemen -- the expert marksmen who were chosen to guard Lenin.  It looks like propaganda art, but it's really striking -- it uses photomontage and it's so modern looking despite the subject.  And there is sad note to it.  Klucis was arrested in Moscow in 1938 and executed, although his fate wasn't known until 1989.