Konrad Vilhelm Mägi (1 November 1878 – 15 August 1925) was one of the first modernist painters in Estonia and the Nordic countries, at the core of whose creative legacy are visionary landscapes.

Konrad Mägi’s works are particularly appreciated for their vigorous and impulsive colours and a pantheistic approach to nature, making him unique in European early-20th-century modernism.

Mägi worked in different parts of Europe, according to which his oeuvre is divided into rather dissimilar chapters: Denmark, Norway, France, the island of Saaremaa, southern Estonia, Italy, etc.

During World War II, his art was condemned (the Soviet authorities ordered his works to be removed from exhibitions, his letters to be destroyed, etc.

[2] Despite the fact that Mägi spent the majority of his life in towns, his oeuvre mainly revolves around landscapes: environments lacking humans, where nature offers irrational, mystical, metaphysical and religious experiences.

Konrad Mägi’s oeuvre is rooted in existential tensions that made him yearn for other potential worlds.

As a young man he took actively part in the revolutionary movement, but later withdrew completely from politics and focussed entirely on art.

He spent his childhood in the small village of Uderna near Elva, which was surrounded by large virgin forests and had a big railway line passing through it.

His father, Andres Mägi, was a comparatively well-to-do estate manager, who took actively part in the Estonian national awakening movement in the second half of the 19th century.

That led to the dissolution of the family: at the age of 11, Konrad Mägi moved to Tartu with his mother and sister.

[5] In the autumn of 1890, Konrad Mägi began to study at the three-year elementary school of the Tartu Apostolic Orthodox Church, which he quit after only a couple of months.

Konrad Mägi and his friends became actively engaged in physical culture and sports, but were also interested in theatre, literature, philosophy and classical music.

[5] In 1897, Konrad Mägi was employed by the Bandelier Furniture Factory, where he was entrusted with making complicated rosettes and volutes.

Because of the factory owners’ wish to improve the quality of their products, Mägi and other employees were enrolled in Rudolf von zur Mühlen’s drawing classes.

[4] Konrad Mägi arrived in Saint Petersburg in January 1903 to study sculpture under Amandus Adamson at the Stieglitz school.

[4] When the revolution of 1905 broke out, Mägi participated in the events: he is said to have organised several provocations in churches and even to have aided revolutionaries in caching their weapons.

He went on to study in the studio of Jakob Goldblatt and also began to teach art lessons, but in April 1906 he left St.

Mägi finally managed to work consistently, being inspired by nature, and this pattern of living in a town and painting in the countryside characterised his lifestyle from then on.

[8] He mainly earned his living by rewriting Estonian folk songs, and as soon as he had put aside a sufficient sum, he decided to travel to Paris at the end of August 1907.

In Paris, Mägi initially stayed at the sculptor Jaan Koort’s place, but later moved to the artists’ colony La Ruche.

He neither dated his works precisely nor provided the exact location of the motif: his goal was to set reality aside and to sense the rhythms and structures that constitute the real essence of things and phenomena.

His brushwork is denser and more intense than in Norway, and the paintings consist of small dots of colour that create an abstract rather than a realist impression.

During the following years, Mägi settled down in Tartu and spent his summers painting in southern Estonia (in Kasaritsa, near Lake Pühajärve, in Otepää etc.).

In the mid-1910s, Mägi’s landscapes became comparatively dark, with walls of trees and ominous skies entering the pictorial space.

During that journey, urban motifs appear in his oeuvre for the first time, but not as symbols of modernity, but rather as an illusion with the main focus on buildings, stairs and other architectural objects.

In the summer of 1922, Mägi travelled to Rome, where he painted surprisingly few concrete urban motifs and focused instead on bodies of water and the sky, reducing the city to a narrow strip in the distance.

Unfortunately, by the mid-1920s, he was terminally ill. During his life and in hindsight, doctors have suspected he may have suffered from gastric ulcers, gastritis, rheumatism, radiculitis and tuberculosis.

Maie Raitar (1944-2008) was able to find and reinstate to art history dozens of Mägi’s works, but to date her thorough archive has unfortunately also gone missing.