Johannes Saal rediscovered
	Tiina Abel

	Let us start with a truism: events and phenomena on the cultural line of development live several lives. Past events have the occasional habit of becoming topical once again, and exert a rich and inspiring influence. However, what happened to Johannes Saal (1911–1964), who started as an artist before WW II, but withered under the conditions of the Soviet-era intellectual violence and absurd conditions of life, is not so common. The bulk of the oeuvre, epistolary legacy and archives of the artist, who had existed in a state of creative lethargy, emerged directly and literally from the suitcases kept under his bed at home. In 1994 the artist’s widow, and his most charming model, donated Saal’s legacy to the Tartu Art Museum. Museums, as institutions of memory, naturally have the duty to point out the possibility of new ahistorical dialogues. Saal’s memorial exhibition indeed took place in 1968, but this was still a time when not all works could be displayed, and some clearly did not make much of an impression. The oeuvre of Johannes Saal, which for decades remained at the margins of Estonian cultural consciousness, and which was recently exhibited at his retrospective, Metamorphoses of Life, at the Tartu Art Museum (17.11.2006–03.06.2007), thus seems quite a revelation.
	Saal’s destiny inevitably makes you notice elements of martyrdom in his art. Emerging as an artist during the Estonian period, Saal was crucified during the Stalinist era and retreated into a hermit’s existence and was forgotten during the Soviet period – this could be an impious summary of Saal’s life, paraphrasing the well-known prayer formula. For Saal, just as for many other Estonian artists who did not take to socialist realism, the consequences of Soviet art administration were disastrous. Each Estonian artist had to find his own survival strategy, where the two extremes were collaboration and internal emigration. Saal’s preference for the latter was partly caused by his illness, and thus his internal emigration was unusual, self-destructive and bore remarkable creative fruit. Whatever occurred in the artist’s inner world was transformed into works that focus on a painful existential struggle. “I have been walking beside life,” admitted Saal, and that reveals a great deal about his daily life. As we will see, modus vivendi determined his modus operandi. In a society forced to spurn individualism, Saal’s personal drama did not, naturally, have the slightest hope of being reflected in public, although his creative impulses (fear, illness, violence, death and power) and their usage as rhetorical means and imagery were familiar to everybody.
	The essential fact of Johannes Saal’s life and work was that he was unwell in the direct, disease-struck sense, because his younger days were darkened by tuberculosis, and his mature age by what might be called madness, in a culturally burdened sense. There was also a sickly inability to adapt. Hence, Saal felt inferior in society as well (“Others have their value, purpose in life – I have nothing.” December 1942). Artistic talent, a blessing given to so few, became his sole tool of self-determination and, paradoxically, of escape. He found it difficult to adapt to society, even when direct political violence was still not (or was no longer) the norm. Crowds, as a threatening anonymous force, seemed to irritate Saal, invade his personal space and obscure his horizons. A psychological struggle for his own place in the world totally filled his pictures; empty space became his enemy.
	Essentially, the artist could not be reconciled with himself. He admitted his existential failure with staggering straightforwardness in a totally absurd place, in an address to the board of the Artists’ Union intended to reconcile artists with Soviet power: “I have wanted to be a human being all along – but I’ve failed.” (1951, January). The leitmotif of Saal’s letters is insecurity. There seemed to be an unattainable ideal dimly visible on the horizon of Saal’s imagination: was it absolute balance, peace of mind, ataraxia? The artist was plagued with doubts about not having enough talent and strength of soul to turn the inner chaos, frustration and destructive animal fear, via his work, into metaphysical, productive, saving fear. A dozen or so self-portraits indicate incessant self-questioning on the topic of absolute freedom. Looking at those works, it is not difficult to imagine how often he actually wanted to be someone else. Saal’s work is dominated by psychic discomfort, a fear of losing his sense of reality completely. If the artist could call a place his own, it was the world of fantasy (literary and mythological plots, but also many pictures imitating life) and/or sleep as a zone between life and death. Most of Saal’s art was born out of his attempts to express and overcome horror and a sense of discomfort, at the same time proving how deeply he understood the aesthetic and moral potential of fear.
	Saal’s works abound with artistic metaphors, often with sets of metaphors. The motif of death played an especially significant part. It crops up in the artist’s works, not only as a personified character, but also as a symbol of violence and redemption waiting at the end of the escape journey. In the imagination of Saal as a mortal being, death comfortingly joined the land (relying on their sense of history and perception of life, Estonians can add new layers to the widespread interpretations of this symbol) with the universe. In the composition Ox. Killed Woman, the woman lying on the ground with her stomach torn open blends the fatal companions of death – blood and earth. In order to escape the nameless and faceless anxiety, Saal gave it a naturalistic form and shape, and rationalised nothingness via the motif of death. Death for the artist is like a cosmic hole, the final and liberating disappearance of the insecure ground beneath the feet. The metaphors of this hole in Saal’s works include a mouth open for a scream, a dead person with a family circle gathered around him, a frame around the Grim Reaper, and white blanks in the composition Monsters.
	In the background of the picture Ox, in the upper corner, an animal who seems funny and absurd prevails as a manifestation of indefatigable force. The grotesque and irony are among Saal’s preferred artistic methods, because they offer possibilities of placing side by side endless contradictory, or at least ambivalent, worlds – real and symbolic, tragic and comical. Integrating the iconography of the mundane and fatal, the pastoral idyll and the martyr’s death, always achieves its aim: the reliability of the world is once again questioned, and monsters are set loose. Saal’s ability to irritate the conformed art lover is remarkable: the arsenal of his grotesque contains sharp and modern weapons. Hanged women dangling from a Christmas tree as its decorations offer an uncomfortable sight, as the sense of propriety does not allow appreciation of the picture’s visual witticism. Despite the obviously tragic story, the hanged person in the Metropolis, moonshine halo around the head, seems a failed attempt to ascend to heaven. The grotesque is indeed one of the few alternatives to his serious nature that the artist could find. Thanks to the exhibition at the Tartu Art Museum, the road to Saal’s personality and his works has been well paved and, fortunately, today’s art historians are well equipped with intellectual tools to research his oeuvre, patiently and thoroughly. We owe it to him and to ourselves. Tiina Abel (1951), art historian, curator of the Kumu Art Museum
	| Estonian Art 1/07 (20) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2007 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |