E

ver since I can remember, I have always been interested in art, museums, exhibitions and books. In my teens at the Riga Secondary School of Applied Art, my idols were the avant-garde painters unfamiliar in the Soviet era, Jēkabs Kazaks and Jāzeps Grosvalds, whose quest in the sphere of formal synthesis took place in the years of the First World War. My diploma work at the State Academy of Art in 1975 was on the Riga Group of Artists, founded in the 1920s, whose creative work in the contemporary mould, to my mind, represents one of the most outstanding phenomena of Latvian 20th century art. My tasks as exhibition curator at the Latvian National Museum of Art have given me the opportunity for a deeper exploration of the Riga Group's art, creating centenary exhibitions of work by Jēkabs Kazaks, Jānis Liepiņš, Uga Skulme and Valdemārs Tone, and studying the most vivid movements in Latvian Classical Modernism: Cubism and New Objectivity. My work on the Estonian-Latvian art exhibition "Unexpected Meeting" in Stockholm in 1993 prompted me to write a monograph on the Classical Modernist painting of the early 20th century. Seeing every day the sincere joy of discovery shown by foreign art historians encountering treasures previously unknown to them, a sense of mission emerged: the idea that the rest of the world should be acquainted with one of the most outstanding pages of our art history.

Dace Lamberga

LE MODERNISME CLASSIQUE - LA PEINTURE LETTONE AU DEBUT DU XXE SIECLE
Lamberga Dace
Published by RMN, 2005
ISBN 10: 9984729672 / ISBN 13: 9789984729671
Language: French