Exhibition "Lost in the Streets: The City Through the Eyes of Latvian Modernists"

From 31 January to 19 July 2026, the exhibition “Lost in the Streets: The City Through the Eyes of Latvian Modernists” will be on view in the 4th- and 5th-floor galleries of the Latvian National Museum of Art, offering insight into the relationship between the city, literature and art in the first decades of the 20th century.

The first half of the 20th century was a period of rapid transformation in Latvian and European culture. The exhibition invites visitors to follow the experiences of Latvian poets and artists in three significant cities – Riga, Berlin and Paris. They were flâneurs and flâneuses – unhurried observers of the city who documented modern architecture, traffic, advertisements, shop windows, and the sounds and rhythms of urban space in both texts and images. Visitors are encouraged to wander among the exhibits in a similar spirit, sensing the atmosphere of the era and discovering its visual language.

Before the First World War, Latvian artists such as Gustavs Šķilters, Jāzeps Grosvalds and others had already strolled through the streets of Paris as flâneurs. After the war, members of the Riga Artists’ Group and writers followed in their footsteps, eager to share their impressions in both writing and visual art. Latvian culture became part of the broader flow of European modernism and enriched it. Andrejs Kurcijs wrote the poetry cycle “A Barbarian in Paris”, while Lūcija Zamaiča sold her parents’ home in Latvia so she could spend several years living in the French capital and travelling through other regions of Europe and North Africa. Berlin inspired both the writer Linards Laicens, who wrote odes to its bustle and machinery, and the sculptor Kārlis Zāle, who – together with his apprentice Arnolds Dzirkals and Andrejs Kurcijs – published the first avant-garde Latvian art journal Laikmets in this metropolis. Alongside the great Western European cities, Riga itself powerfully shaped the work of Latvian modernist artists, writers and thinkers.

Urban depictions in the exhibition range from Ludolfs Liberts’ brilliantly illuminated Parisian night scenes, Jānis Tīdemanis’ city crowds and Ādolfs Zārdiņš’ fantasies to the haunting world of Riga’s outskirts populated by workers, street boys and wanderers in the poetry of Aleksandrs Čaks and Austra Skujiņa, the stark graphics of dandy Kārlis Padegs, and Walter Benjamin’s surreal description of the Daugava riverside market. By bringing together literature and art, the exhibition highlights the social and cultural changes of the era, revealing how Latvian modernists reflected and interpreted the impressions and dynamics of the evolving urban environment.

The exhibition title “Lost in the Streets” is borrowed from Lūcija Zamaiča’s 1923 poetry collection. The display includes both canonical and lesser-known artworks, poems, original printed materials, photographs and video footage.

The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia as the concluding event of the project “Walking Through Time: Flânerie and Modernity in Latvian Interwar Culture” (Project No. lzp-2022/1-0505, project leader Kārlis Vērdiņš).

Partners:

• Latvian National Museum of Literature and Music

• Latvian National Museum of History

• Museum of the History of Riga and Navigation

• Aleksandrs Čaks Museum

• Ģ. Eliass Jelgava History and Art Museum

• Latvian State Archive of Audiovisual Documents

• National Library of Latvia

• Zuzāns Collection

• Andris Kļaviņš and other private collections

• Deutsche Kinemathek (Berlin)