Vanishing of a City: Hilda Kamdron’s Drawings as a Trauma Narrative

Hilda Kamdron, “Narva Street” (1941), pencil. Image courtesy of Kumu Art Museum and Tartu City Museum.

Eero Epner

This exhibition broadens the range of themes and artists in Kumu’s permanent exhibition of Estonian Soviet-era art, Conflicts and Adaptations, by showcasing the work of Hilda Kamdron (1900–1972), a lesser-known artist whose work has largely been lost over time. Her poignant drawings evoke the profound sadness and disorientation experienced by a person facing the devastation of war and the relentless advance of modernisation.

Hilda Kamdron, “Cursed be the War” (undated), watercolour. Image courtesy of Kumu Art Museum and Tartu City Museum.

Hilda Kamdron, “ Kalevi School and Vanemuine Theatre” (1945), pencil. Image courtesy of Kumu Art Museum and Tartu City Museum.

Hilda Kamdron, “Rüütli Street in Central Tartu” (1945), pencil. Image courtesy of Kumu Art Museum and Tartu City Museum.

Hilda Kamdron’s education was sketchy until 1922, when she was admitted to the newly founded Pallas Art School in Tartu, the only institution in Estonia offering professional higher education in the arts at the time. She participated in several student exhibitions but her meticulously crafted conceptual watercolours, many of which depicted documents and photographs, were not widely appreciated. After 1930, Kamdron stopped exhibiting and focused on creating encyclopaedic illustrations for universities, museums and journals.

After World War II, she lived in poverty and loneliness. The Soviet art world did not recognise her and only exhibited in a few amateur art shows. Kamdron destroyed much of her work in a fire, and she herself died almost forgotten.

Hilda Kamdron, “On the Flood Meadow of the River Emajõgi” (1967), drawing. Image courtesy of Kumu Art Museum and Tartu City Museum.

Hilda Kamdron, “At the Corner of Pikk and Pärna Streets” (1967), drawing. Image courtesy of Kumu Art Museum and Tartu City Museum.

Hilda Kamdron, “Uus Street” (24 June 1966), drawing. Image courtesy of Kumu Art Museum and Tartu City Museum.

Hilda Kamdron, “Uus Street” (1966), drawing. Image courtesy of Kumu Art Museum and Tartu City Museum.

The collection of the Tartu City Museum includes several hundred of Kamdron’s drawings. Some of them depict the destruction of her home town Tartu by the Russians during World War II, when almost the entire city centre was bombed and burned to the ground. Kamdron systematically documented the devastation. Other drawings show the demolition of the old wooden quarters in the 1960s to make way for a modernist housing estate in Tartu. These are two profound traumas that Kamdron consistently represented, rendered with a mix of sadness, anger and disappointment.