Günther Reindorff & Villu Toots

Evening Landscape, Günther Reindorff, 1944
(Clickety, clickety to make it biggety!)

I think I came across this beautfully wistful mezzotint on Bukowski’s auction website. I can’t be precise because I was not using the researcher’s friend, ClipCache Pro at the time.

Google didn’t yield much on this Estonian artist apart from some rather badly scanned prints. An example below -

Sibelius
Someone’s scanned or converted this picture to a greyscale image, and blown away all trace of the tonal subtlety it might have once had. Shame. (Why is this delicate job so often delegated to the office junior?)

Here’s another really wonky scan, this time ruined by cackhanded overuse of the sharpen filter…

Stream And straighten it up!

A little more digging, and I wound up on a page showing the work of many Estonian typographers and calligraphers.

Now the history of this part of Northern Europe is complicated to say the least, up until the Fall of the Wall and the eventual acceptance of Estonia into the EU in 2004.

The territory was occupied first by its Russian neighbour, and then by the Third Reich during the second world war, and once more illegally re-occupied by the Soviet Union in 1944.

Consequently, Reindorff had a complicated client list, to say the least. He has designed banknotes and postage stamps for a succession of governmental bodies..

Most of his work was within the graphic arts, with a strong leaning towards calligraphy, and that’s how I found him in the company of his compatriot and fellow pensmith, Villu Toots. (What a wonderful name!)

Stanley Morison Villu Toots

Tahestik Villu Toots

Hermann Zapf (If that surname rings a bell, check this page.)

Kodanic Brych

One more Estonian designer whose work on that page grabbed me was Rudolf Koemets. There’s an invigorating balance between clarity and mania in this poster from 1965. It looks like the work of a Zen master wielding a very large Japanese brushpen just like a Samurai sword….

Raamatu Graafika Rudolf Koemets, 1965