Konrad Mägi

The creation of Konrad Mägi has remained a landmark in the Estonian painting, passing of which has become impossible. As both an artist and organizer of the artistic life (let's remember - Mägi was the first director of "Pallas"), but first of all still as an artist, Konrad Mägi has become a landmark. A landmark, which determines the observations and interpretations of the most important layers of the art history of Estonia of the beginning of the 20.century.
After being in Russia, Finland, Germany, Paris and Norway Mägi arrived in December of 1910 again in Paris. Half a year later, in June of the year 1911, he headed with a friend to Normandy to Dieppe that is situated at the coast of La Manche. Recognizably just then was accomplished also the current work that is rare in addition to the fact to have been made by Mägi also because of the rare offering of his works and also because of several art historically important moments.
Evi Pihlak marks in her monography that "even though the number of works by Mägi, made in Paris and on the coast of Normandy is not very big, we can still claim that thanks to those experiences the artist was already internally ripe for a new creative period." Just from here starts according to the words of the reasearches of Mägi the neoimpressionistic style in the artist's creation. And even though he did not accomplish many works in Normandy, the majority of them were oil paintings and Water-colours were quite rare while taking into consideration the whole Mägi creation. Furthermore - placing of figures on landscapes according to the words of art scientists turns around even the present understanding of the fact that the depiction of groups of people was introduced of the works by Mägi only in the city scapes of the 1920ies.
But despite everything Mägi has not still concentrated on thinking of art history while standing on the coast of Normandy and watching the winding mountain walls, but it has been work that has been on his mind. He has been concerned, how to take quick, but exact sketches of standing groups of people (women's scarves, umbrellas, skirts), how to add to a cold cliff a dark blue spot of water, how to depict the sky so that it would rather seem to us as insanity than an innocent cloud picture. And Mägi succeeds. Expectedly.