Avant-Garde Construction: Leonhard Lapin and His Concept of Objective Art

The following article will look at the change taking place in artistic practice during the 1970s in Estonia—at that time a republic in the USSR—and more precisely, how this was theorized by Leonhard Lapin, an ambitious leader of the Estonian artistic avant-garde. Since the Khrushchev reforms in the late 1950s, adaptation to the trends of Western contemporary art became a kind of touchstone for unofficial art in opposition to official cultural policies and the doctrine of socialist realism, and evidence of being avant-garde. ¹ The decade of the 1970s, following the disillusionment after the suppression of mass demonstrations in Prague in spring 1968, has been described as reactionary. Indeed, direct Western influences disappeared—there is no apparent evidence of adaptation of conceptual art or minimal art as there is of abstract art or Pop art in the 1960s. Instead, the artists, among them Lapin, were invoking the heritage of the avant-garde from the beginning of the century. In general accounts, this change has thus been interpreted as the abandonment of progressive ideas and a retreat to cosmic and metaphysical dimensions.