Eesti kunsti oksjonid

Soft varnish on paper. 1952.
Signature: Vernis mou 1952 42/75 / E. Wiiralt

“Tes yeux sont comme deux fenêtres“
—Eduard Wiiralt

Eduard Wiiralt’s (1898-1954) portraits are never just a reflection of the model’s appearance. As an attentive viewer and listener, he focuses on conveying their deeper essence, their soul, one of the main expressions of which is the eyes. The focus on the models’ eyes became especially evident in the 1930s, when Wiiralt began to depict baroque, sensitive women instead of his earlier expressive works. From then on, the eyes can be considered his central motif, for which the iconic “Inferno” had been a kind of introduction and transition point. Incidentally, the artist himself wrote on one of his sketches: “tes yeux sont comme deux fenêtres” (“your eyes are like two windows”).

Wiiralt continued to draw women with big eyes throughout the 1940s and soon reached the stage of planning “Unrest”. In 1950, he planned to make a picture of a Madonna but later he removed the image of a child and some other details from the plate and replaced them with a landscape and a body of water, rocks and a black cloud.

Work on this print lasted two years and as the idea slowly developed, the figure of the woman became increasingly generalized. Mai Levin has called “Unrest” Wiiralt’s swan song.

Text: Vappu Thurlow, Katre Palm