The story
On the third floor of Kumu, a ship with a blazing red sail stretches across a sheet of paper well over a metre wide. Nikolai Triik, a leading painter of early Estonian modernism, made it in 1910 in tempera and pastel as a study for a large mural. The ship is Lennuk, the vessel of Kalevipoeg, hero of the Estonian national epic.
The picture belongs to Landscapes of Identity, the display of Estonian art from 1700 to 1945, where Baltic German, Russian and Estonian traditions hang side by side.
One floor up, the story moves into harder years. Conflicts and Adaptations follows Estonian art through the Soviet period from 1940 to 1991, when artists had to work within a political order imposed after the Second World War, and a further display, The Future Is in One Hour, picks up the 1990s, after independence returned.
Kumu has been the main building of the Art Museum of Estonia since 2006. The Finnish architect Pekka Vapaavuori set it into the limestone bank between Kadriorg Park and the Lasnamäe district of Tallinn.
