Majad, Kuno Veeber, EKM j 511 M 1818

Kuno Veeber was born Kuno Bernard Weber on the manor Adila, Hageri parish (now part of Kohila parish), the son of Konstantin Villibald Weber and Bertha Louise Weber (née Gildemann). He was the second eldest of their five sons. The family later Estonianised the surname from 'Weber' to the more Estonian 'Veeber'. Kuno Veeber began his artistic studies in 1916 at the Ants Laikmaa Studio School in Tallinn. After graduating from Tallinn's Nikolai I Gymnasium in 1917, he briefly studied medicine at the University of Tartu. From 1919 to 1920, during the Estonian War of Independence, Veeber served as a cyclist in the Estonian army. After the war, he worked as a labourer on the construction of the new Estonian Parliament (Riigikogu) on Toompea Hill in Tallinn. After studying with Ants Laikmaa, Veeber went on to study with the graphic artist Nikolai Triik and the sculptor Jaan Koort. His early works show clear signs of constructivist and cubist influences. In 1922 he entered the Pallas Higher Art School in Tartu, where he studied painting in the studio of the artist Konrad Mägi and graphic techniques with the German Expressionist painter and graphic artist Magnus Zeller. In 1923 he travelled with Zeller to Germany, where Veeber became acquainted with German Expressionism. Despite poor health, Veeber graduated from the Pallas School of Art in 1924. In October of the same year, Veeber went to Paris, where he stayed until 1926. In France, he became part of the Paris School, studied with the painter André Lhote and the Greek artist Demetrios Galanis in Montparnasse, and explored old graphic techniques in the exhibition halls of the National Library of France. Veeber's art of this period was marked by a struggle for clear form and harmonious, balanced pictorial structure, and he became a great admirer of the Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne. In 1927 Veeber travelled to Italy with his wife Agaate on a grant from the Estonian Cultural Endowment Fine Arts Foundation to copy works by the Old Masters. In Venice he visited the Sala di Anticollegio in the Doge's Palace and copied Tintoretto's Mercury and the Three Graces, about a fifth smaller than the original. The copy was exhibited in Estonia in the autumn of 1927 and is now in the collection of the Tartu Art Museum. During his lifetime, Veeber's works were exhibited outside Estonia at the Société des Artistes Indépendants in Paris and at exhibitions in Riga, Kaunas, Helsinki, Cologne, Copenhagen, Moscow, Rome and Budapest.