Leonhard Lapin’s Signs Series and Baltic Conceptualism

Liisa Kaljula

Leonhard Lapin, together with Ülo Sooster, is one of the few Estonian artists of the late Soviet period who has managed to escape the narrow frames of national art history and get into the broader international histories of Soviet nonconformist art. Polish American art historian Marek Bartelik has considered Lapin an outstanding example of a conceptual artist in the Soviet Union whose creative contribution is difficult to ignore and who proves the somewhat misleading name of Moscow conceptualism. [1] After Sooster’s death in 1970 in Moscow, Lapin’s role as a mediator of artistic ties between the Western capitals of the Soviet Union has been one of the most substantial, manifesting itself both in his deep interest in the history of East European avant-gardes and in his close interaction with nonconformist artists based in Riga, Vilnius, and Moscow. In Lapin’s case, traces of this interaction can be found primarily in his work and creative credo, but on a broader generational scale, the exhibition Tallinn-Moscow 1956–1985, held in Tallinn Art Hall in 1996, with its extensive catalogue by Lapin and curator Anu Liivak, should be considered the culmination of his intermediary role.

Born and raised in the small town of Räpina, Lapin began studying architecture at Estonian State Art Institute in 1966 and graduated in 1971, starting work as an architect at the Tallinn Restoration Authority. Being a versatile creative—as well as energetic and curious—spirit, Lapin began to take an interest in visual arts and writing during his studies, and later in life worked professionally in the fields of architecture, art, and literature. The artist’s architectural background is important because it is in this field that we must seek the starting point of his long-term interest in modernity. According to Liivak, in the early 1970s Lapin’s art began to reveal his architectural interests, especially his attraction to the Estonian and Eastern European avant-garde of the early twentieth century, the ideas of which he and the architect Vilen Künnapu initially planned to use to balance the dominant influence of Finnish architecture in Estonia. [2] The understanding of true cultural vitality based on a surrounding social reality characterizes Lapin’s thinking more broadly and manifests programmatically in his 1975 Objective Art manifesto. [3]

Although Lapin seemingly treats objective art broadly and comprehensively, his main message in his speech at the opening of the exhibition Harku 1975 seems to be that Estonian innovative art must, despite everything, turn to its own time and environment. By the latter, Lapin broadly meant the industrial society of the West, but obviously also the Soviet Union, as one of the most industrialized countries in the world. Selected passages from the manifesto show that “objective” art in the broadest sense is an artistic expression of modernity: “Man, who had hitherto felt himself to be a part of living nature, was thrown into an artificial nature of which he did not yet feel himself a part. Adaptation to the new conditions also required a new aesthetic system, a new artistic culture, which I would call objective here: free from the elements of living nature, but connected to the logic of artificial nature, at a higher level with man’s own intellect.” [4] The notion of objective art also represents the continuation of Lapin’s call to his fellow students of the Estonian State Art Institute a few years earlier, in 1971, “to think-paint, think-burn, think-carve,” the main content of which seemed to be a critique of the artisan art education based primarily on craft without developing conceptual thinking in art students. [5]

However, both the manifesto of objective art and Lapin’s call “to think-paint, think-burn, think-carve” should be seen among the first signs of the conceptual turn that took place in Estonian art in the 1970s. [6] Lapin’s own work began to reflect the ideas expressed in these two manifesto-type texts in the late 1960s, largely as a result of eclectic influences received from Western art and Eastern philosophy. It was the impetus received from Western pop art that shook Lapin’s thinking away from the doctrine of aestheticism, so influential in Estonian art at the time, and behind which stood the undisputed spiritual leader of the local art scene, Tõnis Vint. Lapin made his first appearance as an artist at the exhibition SOUP ’69, which was held in Tallinn’s Pegasus Café in 1969 and manifested a group of young artists who were interested in what Lapin has later called the “Union pop” or “Soviet pop.” [7] SOUP ’69 got its name from Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can, which was also depicted on the poster that Lapin made for the exhibition, where a soup can was quickly and carelessly opened at one end, and a Soviet soup spoon was impatiently moving toward the opening. [8] According to Lapin, the participating artists were aware of the danger of falling under the uncritical influence of Western art movements and knew that they had to base their Soviet pop art on local material. [9]

In the mid-1970s, Lapin moved away from the idea of Soviet pop, working on the development of the concept of objective art and creating the most extensive series of his oeuvre, consisting of almost 800 prints dedicated to the constructivist themes of Woman–Machine and Man–Machine. During these years, he also devoted himself to the medium of oil painting and began to form his own color theory, according to which color was a substance of spirituality and painting was a spiritual practice analogous to meditation. [10] According to Liivak, Lapin’s work underwent a break in 1978, ending the first avant-garde period and beginning the transition to the postmodern period. [11] The series Signs (1977–82), completed in the late 1970s in the classical medium of oil painting and in replicable aquatint prints, falls precisely into this transitional period. Just like the aquatint Signs, the oil Signs clearly form a coherent series, even though the paintings are now scattered between two continents: the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection in New Jersey holds eight parts, while two belong to the Art Museum of Estonia and an Estonian private collection. However, the overlapping theme, overlapping techniques, and matching 100-by-90-centimeter dimensions of these ten works [12] suggest that one can tackle them as a serial work, to which Lapin devoted five consecutive years, beginning in the late 1970s.

According to Eda Sepp, signs and their meanings were a theme that captivated the entire generation of Estonian artists through Vint’s teachings. [13] It is no wonder, because for Vint, a sign was more than just a carrier of information: “A sign contains a hidden belief system and philosophical thought. It can be used as a tool in meditation. It contains generalizations for understanding the world and aesthetic programs. It is a talisman and a magical ritual object.” [14] Compared to the early gouache and collage series, where visual signs from Soviet reality are still used as real-life references, the degree of artistic generalization in Lapin’s painting series Signs is already considerably higher and the meaning of the sign is clearly more semiotic. Such signs include, for example, the header of the Soviet Estonian party daily newspaper Rahva Hääl, with its decades-unchanged and always recognizable font; the red national flag of Soviet Estonia with its white-blue waves; the profile silhouette of Karl Marx with a short beard; or the inscription “КОНЕЦ” [end] that appeared at the end of all Soviet films. However, the artist no longer conveys these ideological signs with the impartial gaze of a pop artist, but rather as the provocative gestures of a playful Eastern European conceptualist, in which the conventional meanings of Soviet signs are called upon to change during their use.

Lapin had learned to speak Russian with an accent in the Soviet army, along with other representatives of the Soviet nations, and hiding behind the mask of poor language skills was a subversive game with a language that represented totalitarian power. Although the Soviet censors mostly lacked the ability to read contemporary art, in Soviet conditions this could be considered an activity that undermined the regime, considering that the Soviet art system was built on a unified, unchanging, and ideologically controlled system of signs, which was supposed to take over the entire sphere of visuality over time, thereby preventing signs from being corrupted or eroded. Lapin, however, treats Soviet signs as an eclectic set with common origin and functioning mechanism, which point to Soviet visual culture as a language, a comprehensive system of signs. And Lapin’s understanding of the functioning of the signs is not that distant from the cultural semiotics developed in Estonia after World War II. Yuri Lotman, a central figure in the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School, did not view a sign as an isolated object, but rather as a dynamic component within a larger, interconnected cultural system. His approach evolved from structuralism toward a more organic and historical “semiosphere.”

The system of signs put into circulation by Lapin has become subversive through the technique of appropriation, thereby breaking away from the strict official rules of use of the Soviet sign system. Thus, on closer inspection, Marx’s profile-silhouette depicted by Lapin turns out to be the artist’s own profile, the header of Rahva Hääl is painted in a barely perceptible blue-black and white from the flag of the interwar Estonian Republic, and the focused wave crest fragment on the Soviet Estonian national flag could be seen as a red bottom sitting above the blue sea wave. The main aspect here is not the jokes that are hidden between the lines of the official symbolism, but the use of the official language for an inappropriate purpose, consciously making its total language porous, and eroding it. One such sign is the artist himself—in the work Signed Space, “LAPIN” is painted at the bottom of the canvas—wryly referring to both the modernist myth of the artist and the fact that he is not an element outside the system in the world of ideological signs. However, this concurrently means that the artist, as a user of the official language, also could shape it, since language is a dynamic, collectively created sign system. In the work Signed Space, Eda Sepp has interpreted the “empty, fog-filled space” opposed to the bold black signature as a sign influenced by Zen emptiness, not as a real space itself, just as Lapin’s name is a sign, not himself. [15]

Lapin’s series of paintings also includes geometric shapes from the Eastern European avant-garde, of which the black triangle forms a separate trio in the larger series, appearing first with its upper edge wrapped in white mist (Black Triangle I, 1977), then with its upper edge wrapped in red mist (Black Triangle II, 1978), and finally in the form of a black isosceles triangle with the inscription “КОНЕЦ” (Black Triangle III, 1978). It is precisely this small subset within the larger series that allows us to reinterpret the series and view it as the life cycle of Soviet modernity—first as the utopian ideas and spirituality of the Russian avant-garde, then as implemented in the life of the bloody Stalinist regime, and finally as the end of Soviet modernity itself, as a tombstone in the form of a symbol of the Russian avant-garde. Such an interpretation is not at all obvious when looking at individual works, whereas juxtaposed it could have brought the artist a fair amount of trouble, especially since the works were not made in the drawer or suitcase format typical of the underground art of the time, but in 100 by 90 centimeters, a large exhibition format.

According to Lapin, the downward-pointing black triangles in the series are an ambivalent motif, which can also be interpreted as a feminine erotic symbol, a black pubic triangle. [16] However, even in this case, the set of three black triangles allows for the interpretation of a grand narrative—be it Soviet modernity or a romantic relationship—that has a beginning, culmination, and end. Lapin himself has retrospectively explained the painting series as an attempt at self-purification from contaminated Soviet signs, but also as a conscious turning of Soviet signs into the absurd. [17] His chosen medium of oil painting is also important in this goal, contrasting the slow, handmade, and spiritually loaded medium of panel painting with the quick and more technical mass-produced media of Soviet visual culture. Most of the series was acquired by the American art collector Norton Dodge when he visited Estonia in the early 1980s, which is why they never made it to the exhibition in Estonia as a complete set. According to Lapin, Dodge’s visits to the Estonian artists’ studios were always accompanied by the “tail of the black Volga”—the constant KGB surveillance of the American economist and art collector. [18]

The series also includes a canvas painted entirely in red, called Red Square (1978), which allows for an ambivalent vision of both the symbol of the Russian avant-garde and the symbol of Soviet power in central Moscow, Red Square. In the English title of the work, Red Square, this ambivalence functions not only on the visual level, but also on the linguistic level of the title. A similar effect has been used by Moscow sots art artists, such as Leonid Lamm, in his series of paintings The Dynamics of Red Square (1976). Lapin himself described his work as a “Red Square Meter,” painted under the inspiration of material received from Leningrad artist Pavel Kondratiev (1902–1985), who in the 1930s had been a dedicated follower of the suprematist Kazimir Malevich and had met other great figures of the Russian avant-garde before becoming acquainted with Lapin in 1975. [19] In Red Square—as his otherwise harsh suprematist teacher also acknowledged—Lapin painted a green surface underneath to intensify the red color, just as Malevich had taught at the beginning of the century. [20] However, by that time, Lapin was already using the color red in a complex conceptual way, playing with the way it belonged to both the sign system of the Russian avant-garde and the Soviet regime. In 1979, under criticism from the authorities for his design for the front cover of the almanac Art, Lapin “designed his last issue, which was already in print at the time of the ban, to be entirely red in the Soviet flag color as a ‘gift’ to the communists.” [21] However, it is precisely because of this conceptuality that Lapin’s complete set of Signs could never find recognition from Kondratiev, who had been Lapin’s main teacher in suprematism.

As Lapin himself stated: “We turned the idea of constructivism upside down, and it is no wonder that Kondratiev, a representative of suprematism seeking pure form, was disturbed by its embrace of the paradigm of conceptualism. But time is indifferent to art, time molds form and ideas at will, just as many social utopias are realized in the negative of the original form.” [22] In 1979, Kondratiev and Lapin cooperated to put together a special issue on suprematism for the Estonian-language almanac Kunst, for which Lapin was working as a graphic designer at the time. For reproducing Malevich’s Black Square on the front cover of the almanac, which was the first postwar reproduction of this work for an Estonian-speaking reader, Lapin lost his job as a designer at the publishing house. [23] Thus, the painting series Signs (which was finished in the following years) turned the juxtaposition of Soviet and Russian avant-garde symbols into a conceptual late-Soviet alphabet, which can be compared with other voluminous series exploring the Soviet discursive vocabulary, such as Grisha Bruskin’s Fundamental Lexicon (1985–1990). Eda Sepp interprets Signs as a process of invalidating political iconography and admits that, unfortunately, the work was never exhibited at a time when Lenin’s portraits still had real political power. [24]