(ANSA) - ROME - Bright and powerful colours. Landscapes and portraits, strong and fascinating. For the first time Rome hosts the works of Konrad Magi (1878-1925), one of Estonia's greatest artists in the twentieth-century. The exhibition is organized on the occasion of Estonia's presidency of the EU Council in the forthcoming semester, by the Eesti Kunstimuuseum - National Museum of Estonian Art, in collaboration with the Embassy of Estonia to Italy. The art show will be hosted by the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, from 10 October to 28 January 2018. One of most ''eccentric'' protagonists of the European art in the Twenties, around WW1, Magi measured himself with all styles, touching some - especially expressionism, but staying 'independent'. Although he was fond of it, he did not conform to Estonian traditional art. Magi had a very personal approach to painting, art which he dealt with for less than twenty years, since 1906, when he abandoned his school in St. Petersburg to take refuge in the Aland Islands, a sort of Community of musicians, writers, painters and free men.

Then he stayed in Paris, Normandy and Norway. Restless, problematic, unstable man, Magi went back to Estonia in the summer of 1912, where he was one of the founders of Pallas's Art School, which became a campus for dozens of artists. A few years later, in the early 1920s, he began to wander over Europe, visiting Venice, Capri and Rome. The sun, the light, the colours of the Mediterranean Sea seemed to capture him, but the artist continued to measure himself with the problems of a complex existence, precariously balanced. (ANSA)