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This article focuses on the ideological underpinnings, accomplishments and assessments of art under the local authoritarian regime (1934-1940). Unity, nationalism, the cult of the leader and peasant life were promoted, denouncing modernist influences in favour of classical traditions and ethnographic heritage. The last six years of Latvia's independence saw both major state-commissioned art projects and individual contributions matching the prescribed tenets to some extent, while most critics maintained that true Latvian national art was still in the making. This ideal, which could be termed nationalist realism, remained desirable, but not mandatory in comparison with some neighbouring totalitarian countries.
The concept of an omnipresent ideology, permeating everything created in any society, has held pride of place in Western humanitarian sciences for a considerable time. It has become a sort of common sense that '[i]deologies are those bodies of beliefs, images and values which provide our understanding of the world'.1 From such a viewpoint, ideology as the subject of a scholarly study is as topical as it is risky a choice because the researcher cannot avoid being influenced by some ideology, most likely differing from the one he or she purports to examine. While it can surely be claimed that certain beliefs, images and values are invisibly indoctrinated through the most liberal versions of democracy (their evaluation and comparison to other systems' pros and cons is yet another issue), the aim of this article is to take a bit more narrow approach, focusing on the ideological tenets extolled by the local authoritarian regime (1934-1940), which aimed to bring prosperity and a flourishing condition to the Latvian nation in general and its art in particular. The effects of these ideas and assessment of results can possibly provide noteworthy insights too. The social context is not the main focus of this article, which relies on a complex approach mostly consisting of stylistic and comparative analysis, although the historical background is briefly outlined at the beginning. Primary attention is paid to writing about art and artworks in which the ideological function largely supplanted the aesthetic one.
Previous researches
The subject has been a somewhat uneasy topic for decades, as is seen in the present state of studies. The period of the late 1930s was understandably denounced by the following...