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Jekabs Kazaks (1895-1920)
Aliases: Ekab-Robert Petrovič Kazak; Jëkabs Kazaks; Jēkabs Kazaks
Professions: Painter
Jekabs Kazaks Biography
(b Riga, 18 Feb 1895; d Riga, 30 Nov 1920). Latvian painter. Like many Latvian modernists, his formal artistic training and the choice of his most compelling subjects derived from his experience as a refugee during World War I. In 1915 he was evacuated from the Art School in Riga to the one in Penza, south-east of Moscow, where he remained until 1917. In Moscow he saw Sergey Shchukin’s and Ivan Morozov’s collections of modern French art. He was also profoundly inspired by the series of Refugee and Riflemen paintings of his fellow countryman Jazeps Grosvalds, bringing to these themes his own intimist painter’s sensitivity. Refugees (1917; Riga, Latv. Mus. F.A.) combines the modesty and witty minutiae of naive art and a classical pictorial structure. Similarly, Kazaks often recorded his experiences as a soldier with humour and warmth, eschewing the overtly heroic or patriotic. After World War I, he became the leader in Latvia of the avant-garde association Ekpresionisti, which evolved into the RIGA ARTISTS’ GROUP. Accordingly, Kazaks’s work assumed stronger colour, increased angularity and flatness of form, and, at times, bleaker moods. Circus (1918; Riga, Latv. Mus. F.A.) is a portrait of two anxious clowns backstage, and its psychological—even sexual—ambiguity is unprecedented in Latvian art. His early death has itself been attributed to extreme anxiety arising from a malicious public debate over the validity of modernism, instigated by four Latvian academic artists led by Iznis Roberts Tillbergs, who were incensed by the local modernists’ popularity and success. This defamation of his work, complete with a spectacular parody of abstract art known as ‘Ballism’ (as opposed to Cubism), was particularly unwarranted in Kazaks’s case, for his acceptance of avant-garde ideas had always been conditional, his work resolutely representational, and his professional successes modest.
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