Oskar Raunam 1914–1992 Cow Milking in the Pasture. 1948

Oskar Raunam has obeyed the prevailing order and painted a somewhat caricatured picture of life, where everything is always fine. It is an idealized image of a beautiful Estonia, where cows give milk uncontrollably, women carry it for the people in continental villages (of course barefoot, emphasizing the closeness to nature) and the sun never sets. However, Raunam has not completely unhooked himself from his early creative style - especially in the background, he looks for color transitions with the same impressionistic fervor as before. He is also gently subjective in his treatment of the figures, but still not enough for the painting to be salon-worthy. A document of the era, as the images of agricultural work, a characteristic of Estonians, were used to introduce the new Soviet identity, but it was placed in a completely new context.