Who the hell is Konrad Mägi?

Have you heard of Konrad Mägi? I hadn’t up until two weeks ago, and in many ways I still haven’t. I can’t seem to grasp onto anything when I start into the remote, sunken eyes of one of Estonia’s greatest painters. Not his actual eyes, of course, considering he’s been dead for a century. Mägi is somewhat of a household name out there. One of the pioneers of Estonian modernism. They’ve even got a restaurant named after him in the capital of Tallinn. Despite this, he was virtually unknown outside Estonia.

In a 2010 exhibition at the Art Museum of Estonia, Mägi’s work was contextualised within Western Art for the first time and suddenly everyone wanted a piece of him. Since, he’s had shows in Italy, Finland, Norway, Denmark… and now London.

Norwegian Landscape, 1909, Oil on cardboard, 42.7 × 47.2 cm.

On a glorious Saturday morning I turned up to Dulwich Picture Gallery in pieces, balanced on a knife’s edge of hungover and sleep-deprived. At the entrance to the exhibit, I was informed that most of the pieces are unglazed. Perfect, I thought. This is exactly the kind of information someone in my nauseated state needs. Visions of terrible accidents followed by handcuffs and an astronomical fine flashed through my head. For all you know I’m writing this from prison – Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland are my cellmates.

Field of Flowers with a Little House, 1908–1910, Oil on cardboard, 37.4 × 48.3 cm.

Before Konrad Mägi finally started painting, he’d already been pirouetted around the continent by the whims of circumstance. Leaving Estonia for St. Petersburg in 1903, he enrolled at the Stieglitz Art School but quickly lost interest in his studies. The First Russian Revolution of 1905 further complicated things so he packed up and headed for the Åland Islands off the coast of Finland in 1906. If you want to feel better about not having done enough with your life, Mägi hadn’t created a single painting by the time he was 27. Then a year in Helsinki while he was saving up to move where every artist dreamed of. Paris. The promised land. Except it wasn’t – poverty and disillusionment drove him out to Norway in 1908. This is when he began seriously committing paint to canvas. Such are the contents of the first room in this show.

Norwegian Landscape with a Pine Tree, 1908–1910, Oil on canvas, 58.5 × 75.2 cm.

Norway’s outstanding natural beauty clearly impressed itself on Mägi as there’s a reverence in what he paints. The colour and ambition in the first few landscapes are quite dull but you can tell when he finds his footing because everything starts looking a lot more sophisticated. His pointillist brushstrokes become more considered and the colours begin to sing. These lonely visions of valleys, fields, and lakesides tell of Mägi’s lifelong comfort outdoors. Here’s a man who has touched plenty of grass. His wintery scenes render the uniformity of snow with graceful, sweeping brushstrokes that glitter under the gallery lighting.

In two paintings the scenery suddenly turns weird; everything starts swimming before your eyes like a cavalcade of cells through a microscope. These psychedelic cellular forms creep over the land, up trees, and across the sky. Biology and geology becoming one. Did someone put something in my coffee? There are accounts of a broke and starving Mägi surviving off blueberries in the forest. Who’s to say he didn’t stumble across some funny looking mushrooms too?

Portrait of a Norwegian Girl, 1909, Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 48.5 cm.

I was arrested by the Portrait of a Norwegian Girl, her inquisitive eyes refusing to let go of mine. Her fiery ginger hair, her red dress, and the rust-coloured tapestry in the back struck a resonant harmony of hues. She measured me with curiosity laced with a bit of judgement. I walked away because I couldn’t stand up to her.

On a table next to her (I like to believe these two paintings occur within the same space though they’re painted years and miles apart) is a dazzling bouquet of Lilacs. A tablecloth of the most resplendent silk hummed along to the patterns in the tapestry behind it.  Lilacs really lend themselves to pointillism as their flaky petals are captured with energetic brushwork. A frenetic arrangement of marks coalesces into flora the further back you stand, its delicate scent wafting off the canvas.

Lilacs, 1915, Oil on canvas, 78 × 70.5 cm.

While he was in Paris, Konrad Mägi cared little for most contemporary art. He preferred the Old Masters. “After looking at old portraits,” he wrote, “it is especially painful to look at all this sloppy rubbish.” Rubbish by such artists as Cézanne, van Gogh, Degas, Gauguin, Matisse, Manet and Monet. I guess even the folks of a supposed golden age are looking back to an even shinier golden age… His apathy, however, didn’t stop him from soaking up all the myriad movements that were swirling in the art world’s capital. The Neo-impressionism of his landscapes is giving peak Seurat. His busily patterned interiors are giving Art Nouveau. While his vivid colours reject a naturalistic palette in the same manner as the Symbolists.

In autumn of 1910 Konrad Mägi gives Paris another chance but within a year he’s so done with the place that he moves back to Estonia. There, he leaps into portraiture and his pick-n-mix of influences enlarges to Cubism, Fauvism, and German Expressionism (who cares what any of this means, art movements are arbitrary anyway xxx).

Young Rom, 1915, Oil on canvas, 66 × 50.2 cm.

So receptive is his style to place and circumstance that the paintings in this room almost look like they were made by someone else. The backgrounds are still richly textured but the hand that applied this paint is more restrained. The brushwork is softer, more deliberate. At this point I was gazing at every painting with a thousand-yard stare, my last surviving brain cells attempting to steer the ship. I was in somewhat similar company among painted faces turned away or eyes that vacantly looked right through me. Is this how Mägi saw himself in light of his deteriorating mental health? An apparition to be seen through? Clothing, on the other hand, he renders with a geographical sense of space as his brushstrokes revert to the joyful pointillism of his landscapes.

Kristina Õllek, Between Sediments and Dead Zones, 2026.

Halfway through the exhibition is the mausoleum of Dulwich Picture Gallery where the remains of the gallery’s three founders are kept. The fourth sarcophagus is famously kept empty. Maybe it was being kept vacant just for me. As waves of nausea swept over me, leaving behind aggressive headaches, I felt more akin with the founders of the gallery than its attendants. I was eyeing up that voluptuous tomb reserved for me… but a grand sculpture was in the way. The work of Kristina Õllek stood like some ancient monolith in the middle of the mausoleum, casting conspiratorial shadows. Slabs of limestone were suspended by plastic tubing from an arch no bigger than a tight doorway. It looks as if it had sprouted from the ground, bits of rubble and tubes intermingling on the floor in a manner both primordial and medical. The whole thing had crystallised under so much salt that I would’ve tried to lick it if my tastebuds weren’t on strike. Spring’s virgin sunshine blazed through the amber windows. It’s imprint on the wall moved me to delirious tears. Two other windows were inspiring different emotions in me; their edges also caked with salt, their faces smeared with some kind of algae. Cyanobacteria, in fact. Like a plant craning itself towards the sun, these ancestral producers of oxygen climbed hungrily up the windows. It’s meal-time.

I sat there for an indeterminate amount of time thinking thoughts too insignificant to mention here.

When the ache in your soul begins to manifest itself in your joints, you either go to a chiropractor or you go on holiday. Konrad Mägi opted for the more entertaining option, spending the summers of 1913 and 14 in the Estonian island of Saaremaa. The limestone in Kristina Õllek’s monument in the mausoleum also comes from this island. Enthralled by the bewildering beauty of Nature all around him, the landscapes Mägi produced during this period depict Her as something maternal yet indifferent. The only trace of civilisation in these scenes are wind-blasted buildings swallowed up like canapes by the immense valleys and coasts. An otherworldly diversity of plant-life becomes the vehicle for Mägi’s feverish colour palette. The sky and the earth are shouting at each other in hostile hues that convey some growing unrest or anticipation; something successfully ignored but not forgotten. Obsession highjacks his eyes as he paints the same lighthouse six times in ever-increasing splendour. The distinct shifts in style and tone between the various places he's lived and painted tell of an artist eagerly receptive to the world around him.

Vilsandi Motif, 1913–1914, Oil on canvas, 89 × 76 cm.

The modernist influences Mägi picked up in Paris never left his side either. Bringing them back home, he cultivated them along a trajectory different from the rest of Europe. Artists all over the continent were depicting the sublimity of touching grass but Mägi’s landscapes feel particularly Estonian A kaleidoscopic tradition of folklore and mysticism suffuses itself over his complex arrangement of earth, sea, and sky. The wind talks through the delicacy of his brushstrokes. His landscapes represent that fleetingly brief moment when the grey utilitarianism of society drops from your eyes, revealing the world as a living breathing entity.

So why, then, did no one notice his work for so long? Well because more established artists in Western Europe were already kinda doing this. Their artistic heritage had existed for a century by the time Estonia’s finally blossomed. When the Soviet Union banned all abstract art in favour of Socialist Realism in 1934, it buried Mägi’s oeuvre deeper into obscurity. It wasn’t until the late 1950s when his work was allowed to breathe again. But it was the air of a very different era. The art world had moved onto the likes of Frankenthaler, Bacon, Hockney, and Warhol by then. Modernity had shifted to something else.

(NOT IN THIS SHOW) Landscape with the Sun, 1913–1914, Oil on cardboard, 42.5 × 35.7 cm.

So why, then, is everyone suddenly noticing now? Well… same reason. Modernity’s shifted again. Before digital communication made everything happen everywhere all at once, art propagated around the world at a glacial pace. It takes close to a million years for a photon created in the core of a star to reach the surface. Once there, it’s only an eight-minute straight line through the vacuum of space and into our eyes as light. Art, in my opinion, moves just like our photon, ricochetting through the density of a star on its way out. A continental drift that passes from one eye to the next across oceans of people. Words passed from a million mouths one at a time. A process that’s even slower in nations who’ve been on the receiving end of imperialism… But eventually, given enough time, the light emerges. Even if the world has moved onto something else.

Jonathan Jones of The Guardian gave this exhibition 1 / 5 stars. He really didn’t like it. Reading his review, you’d think that the entire sacred edifice of modernism is under attack because Dulwich Picture Gallery put on an exhibition of an artist that isn’t as celebrated as the likes of Matisse, Picasso, Duchamp, Chagall, etc… Jonathan’s idea of modernity is a museum where the staff shush you aggressively if you talk barely above a whisper. The post-modernists ran amok in this museum, graffitied the walls, heckled the staff, and generally took the piss out of its stuffiness for the plot. We’re, what… post-post-modern now? Who gives a rat’s ass about atavistic notions such as a canon of ‘great’ artists that exemplify a generation or period of history?

Channels of distribution are always opening. And closing. We’re often getting hooked on random niches of art resurfacing from other nations. Why do you think all the music nerds are suddenly into 70s Japanese jazz fusion now? It was Ethiopian jazz this time last year. Forgotten artists are often resurfacing because the beauty of an artistic culture doesn’t simply reside among the few artists (usually men) who got there first. Modernity shouldn’t simply be represented by its canon but by its richness of voices where people are doing things adjacently. Yes, sometimes it’s the same thing in a different font. But so what?

Landscape with a Red Cloud, 1913–1914, Oil on canvas, 70.4 × 78 cm.

I was frozen dead in my tracks by a sky erupting with fiery clouds like a flame eating through tissue. But the focus in Landscape with a Red Cloud is thrown off by the rugged and murky foliage in the foreground. I can’t help but feel that Mägi’s scenes with the landscape at its most busy and dramatic were painted at the lowest ebb of his mental health. As if he perceived the world closing in on him.

This doesn’t change in the final room of the show, the works he painted leading up to his death. A lifetime of wrestling with physical ailments and declining mental health began to take its toll all at once. He knew the end was near. The colours are more subdued, creeping towards a naturalistic palette. The restlessness of pointillism smoothed out into lethargic strokes of the brush. Dark outlines hover over the contours of the land like the corona of some black eclipse. But the spell-binding serenity remains. These paintings are moments of acceptance amidst an insane dance of love and death.

The sun was showering the earth with amber when I was waiting at the bus stop outside Dulwich Picture Gallery. Susurrations of trees in the wind. Birds continued their singing. An open-top convertible with a happy couple drove past. For a very brief instant, I felt like I had carried the divinity from Konrad Mägi’s paintings out into the world with me. My heart lifted with joy. Only to be brought down low again by the desperate need for Paracetamol and a bin to throw up in.