August Luiga

Having entered the Pallas School of Art in Tartu in 1937 and graduated from the Tartu State Art Institute in 1947, August Luiga’s career as an artist began in the midst of various regimes and reorganisations. Nonetheless, his aesthetic choices seem to have adhered to the humane, individualist approach of the 1930s. Võrguparandajad (Net Repairers) would seem to deal with the typical subject matter required of Soviet artists, yet the picture lacks the heroism or the pathos of Soviet nation-building that the state expected of artists. In reality, what appears to be going on in the picture is something quite different from net repairing. With what affection the man in the hat looks at his companion.