The emergence of exile art was caused by the outcome of World War II, which triggered a wave of migration. In the Baltics – Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – hundreds of thousands of citizens, fleeing the front and the approaching hostilities and the expected renewed occupation by the Red Army, decided to head west as refugees. People fled Bolshevik terror and deportations, such as those experienced in 1941. Among the refugees was Raimonds Staprāns’ family.
Fifteen paintings by Raimonds Staprāns have been selected for the exhibition at the Latvian National Museum of Art. These works have never been exhibited in Latvia, and they travel to Riga from the artist’s studio in San Francisco where he painted every day of his life. The exhibition invites visitors to explore the evolution of the artist’s oeuvre, tracing its development from early 1950s compositions to the final works of his lifetime.
He earned his MFA at the University of California, Berkeley (1952–1954), the formative epicenter of abstract expressionism on the West Coast. The intellectual environment of the U.S. West Coast significantly influenced his artistic development. Staprāns did not separate abstract painting from figurative painting; he was drawn to simple, uncluttered and balanced composition, taut arrangements of sunlit and shaded planes, and nuanced tonal relationships. Although Staprāns adopted figurative means for depicting objects and landscapes, the governing idea in his art was always the autonomy of art: his works are not about narrative or illustration but about color and composition. Staprāns’ painting is rooted in the notion of art for art’s sake.