Herald Eelma

Herald Eelma’s creative output has been mainly prints, drawings, and illustrations. Despite the conservative art education he received between 1953 and 1959, Eelma made an innovative contribution to the Estonian graphics culture of the second half of the twentieth century. The years of his studies at the graphic arts department of the State Art Institute of the Estonian SSR (now the Estonian Academy of Arts) in Tallinn coincided with the cultivation of socialist realism, which was based on the formal tradition of academic drawing and on Soviet ideology. However, the second half of the 1950s saw a thawing of the harshness of the previously severe Stalinization, so young artists mustered the courage to choose alternative paths. Together with other young printmakers, such as Peeter Ulas (1934–2008) and Renaldo Veeber (1937–2010), who also graduated in 1959, Eelma can be identified with the generation of those who “broke through” the strict canon of socialist realism. Those were the artists who developed the graphic language of the so-called severe style—a modernized realism, which portrayed a less-idealized version of everyday Soviet life.

In his early oeuvre, Eelma worked mainly in the medium of linocut, whose angular facture well suited the geometricized, laconic visual language of the severe style. In his depictions of sportsmen, builders, fisherman, or young people, the artist created dynamic compositions that revealed his interest in the inner life of an individual. We can see here a beginning of the psychological, but also philosophical, themes of a person’s place in the world that he would subsequently tackle in his prints in diverse ways.

Eelma’s early works also show his distinctive interest in elaborating linocut plates in a sophisticated manner: He creates his images from decorative elements, which sometimes appear close to pure abstraction. In addition to figurative scenes, there are still-life or landscape motifs, in which the subject seems to be merely an excuse for the delight in searching for new forms. However, Eelma rarely depicts something without a message. In the second half of the 1960s, he created works warning about a nuclear threat, along with the series Path to Freedom (1969), which, while referring to revolution and social struggle, in retrospect particularly alludes to events of the Prague Spring of 1968. Reflecting a general disillusionment with the possibility of “socialism with a human face,” he depicts crowds of people who, in their alienation, look frozen in the time-space continuum. Even more ornamental is the diptych Tree I and Tree II (1972, ZAM, D05803), whose forms consist of netlike structures: The crown of a tree develops into a rural landscape, and a tree trunk consists of interwoven human heads. These refer to such topical issues of the 1970s as the relationship between nature and humankind and the rise of ecological awareness, as well as (national) heritage and traditions. While most of his works are tied to Estonian or regional heritage, in the series Bridges (1974, ZAM D02387, D02689), Eelma turned to European heritage in general, touching upon its rich strata of cultural and technological history.

The theme of heritage became central in Eelma’s lithographic works. Unlike his stylized and line-based linocuts, in the lithographs he evolved an illusionistic, realistic mode of depiction, which could have a suggestive effect on the viewer. One of the first works in this creative line of development is Cradle (1979, ZAM, D02641), which shows a landscape with forest and field in an abstract, cradle-like framing. While at first sight the landscape looks wild, on closer inspection we notice some fruit trees, as well as evidence of domestication. Then comes the understanding that we are witnessing an abandoned farmyard, whose owners were quite possibly sent to Siberia in the mass deportations of 1941 and 1945–51. Thus, in a very discreet manner, Eelma narrates the tragic story of his nation, referring in a beautifully symbolic way to the peasant’s farm as a cultural cradle. Farms as the nests or bodies of a family tree were developed consistently in his lithographs of the 1980s. However, soon after, he introduced a more generalized, symbolic, and philosophical approach, depicting the farmhouse as a microcosm, and landscape forms as part of a macrocosm. The theme of macrocosms also continued in a series dedicated to glacial boulders—post–Ice Age phenomena commonplace in Estonia or Finland, where the surfaces of huge stones contain landscapes of their own.

From the mid-1980s, Eelma has been working extensively in drawing techniques. In the middle of the 1970s he made a hyperrealist drawing series depicting human figures in a pop art–like, but at the same time defamiliarized, manner; a decade later his drawing style had significantly changed. Reflecting the events of perestroika and a sense of liberation in society, Eelma’s visual language became even more dynamic and significantly expressive. His compositions, mainly in charcoal, envisioned existentialist themes by means of highly abstract but symbolically laden motifs. 

Eelma taught in the drawings department of the Estonian Academy of Arts between 1994 and 2005 and was a professor and head of curriculum between 1995 and 2000. Among his other activities, he has contributed rich original illustrations to such cornerstone texts as the Finnish epic Kalevala (1984) and Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen (1998), as well as texts important for Estonian culture, such as Dragon of the North by Friedrich R. Kreutzwald (1981) and Marginalia by Friedebert Tuglas (1986). Maintaining deep dialogues with original narratives, Eelma has managed to experiment with different visual approaches, at the same time always remaining himself in his search for philosophical and symbolic meanings.

Elnara Taidre

Photo portrait: Herald Eelma, 1983. Photo by Kalju Suur. Archive of the Art Museum of Estonia. EKM j 55001 FK 291