Abject Abstraction.Searching for the Voices of the Women Painters in Late Soviet Estonian Art
Abject Abstraction. Searching for the Voices of the Women Painters in Late Soviet Estonian Art

Summary/Abstract: This paper will look at the women painters working in Soviet Estonia in the 1960s and 1970s whose approach to abstract art differed from that of their male peers, even when they belonged to the same art groups. In the late Soviet decades, several women painters of the Tartu circle (Tartu sõpruskond) and ANK’64 groups turned away from the aesthetic mainstream of Estonian art and started to paint abstract compositions that focused on abject matters. Instead of the geometric they often preferred the organic, associated with the bodily, and instead of the rational and orderly, they often turned to the irrational and disorderly. In the theory of the Bulgarian French philosopher Julia Kristeva, the abject relates to the outcast feminine – amorphous, impure and associated with bodily fluids – as opposed to the pure and clean masculinity, threatening the symbolic order of culture. Not being familiar with Western feminist theory, Valve Janov, Silvia Jõgever and Kristiina Kaasik were intuitively searching for new ways to express themselves in the male-dominated Estonian art world, which cultivated aesthetic resistance to the chaotic and brutal Soviet environment during the late Soviet period, striving to reconnect with the lost modernist world of the interwar independence period. The art history canon that started to take shape in late Soviet art criticism has highlighted masculine painterly ideology, ostracizing various voices that deviated from the aesthetic mainstream of 1960s and 1970s Estonian art.

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