Talk of artistic freedom is cheap in the United States, where, aside from periodic flaps about sex or obscenity, pretty much anything goes. In this open atmosphere artists really are at liberty to create everything from fierce political cartoons to pure abstraction.

Consider by contrast the privations and coercion artists faced in the Soviet Union and its sphere. In Estonia, which fell under Soviet control after World War II, the imposition of Stalinism in the late 1940s meant book burnings, the suppression of modernist painting and public denunciation of all but the approved Socialist Realist style. In 1950 a half-dozen Estonian art students accused of "anti-Soviet activities" were sentenced to 10 years of hard labor in Siberia.

That is just a flicker of the complex background for "Printmaking From Soviet Estonia," an extraordinary show up through April 26 at the Museum of Russian Art (TMORA) in south Minneapolis. Founded as a showplace for Socialist Realist painting, which was endorsed by Soviet authorities but rejected in the West, the six-year-old museum is now broadening its exhibition program to include art that critiqued the Soviet system from the inside. Its main galleries feature Soviet-era landscapes, portraits and vignettes in a loosely "impressionistic" style. That work may have offended Stalinist hardliners but will strike most American viewers as beautifully painted and politically innocuous.

Images from the edge

The Estonian prints, however, are a tougher brand of modernism, much more psychologically pointed and stylistically closer to the edgiest American and European art of the post-WWII era. On loan from the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University, the 41 prints by eight artists are a testimony to the audacity and integrity of individuals who quietly defied a repressive regime and maintained contact with the outside world at considerable risk. The show's impact is enhanced by its dramatic, and very effective, black-walled installation by Reed Fellner, a Minneapolis designer who also doubled as curator.

Subjects that Americans take for granted -- history, politics, sexuality, public life, the environment -- were banned by Estonia's Soviet overlords starting about 1948 and continuing until the country regained its independence in 1991, said Judi Dutcher, TMORA's president and director. Painters and writers were especially watched for signs of deviancy from cultural orthodoxy, but printmakers sometimes were able to fly under the censor's radar because their medium was considered comparatively unimportant.

With their bold designs and subtle colors, the images at TMORA would be right at home among Walker Art Center's late 20th-century prints. Defying the ban on sexual and body imagery, Aili Vint in 1987 did a series of abstract photo engravings that arrange mirror-images of body parts -- breasts, arms, folded legs -- into medallion-like designs whose symmetry helps mask and diffuse the content. Leonard Lapin, whose main output is lithographs and screen prints of simple geometric shapes -- circle, triangle, cross -- also issued a provocative 1982 "Self-portrait as Venus," in which the burly bearded artist defies gender expectations by posing as a nude odalisque.

Jüri Okas does a little experimental gender-bending by striking a St. Sebastian pose, a stance that probably would have offended officials on both religious and sexual grounds. The majority of his images, however, are of barren urban blocks and desolate landscapes that are an implicit criticism of Soviet-era culture.

Political undercurrents

Even seemingly innocuous abstractions can carry political undercurrents, said Dutcher. She cited the "Under the Sky" serigraphs by Raul Mell, whose overlapping grids of black, white and blue subtly evoke the colors of the long-banned Estonian flag, she said. Juri Arrak also struck a patriotic note with his lithographs of Estonian folk games. Played with a desperate joylessness by groping characters, the games Arrak depicts -- including blind-man's bluff and stickball -- take on symbolic overtones of oppression and threat. Similarly, Kaljo Pöllu employs a crisp Pop style in his aquatint/photo relief images of shadowy figures and creatures (birds, beetle, fish) representing "Fear," "Horizon" and other anxious motifs.

Vello Vinn evidently has an obsession with time as a metaphor for the history that has treated his homeland so badly. His photo-lithographs and engravings include montages of clocks, watches and other timepieces amid images of races, theaters and creatures -- snails, butterflies -- that can be read as metaphors for social flux. Malle Leis depicts beautiful friezes of meadow grasses, flowers and berries to express dismay at the ecological devastation that followed Estonia's rapid industrialization after WWII.

That these striking images escaped censorship is a tribute to the ingenuity, integrity and independence of individuals who kept faith with the power of art during long decades of darkness.

Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431