Hilda Vīka

Hilda Vīka (5 November 1897 – 14 February 1963), also known as Hilda Vīka-Eglīte, was a Latvian artist and writer. She made stylised watercolour and oil paintings of everyday life and dreamy visions. She wrote poetry, short stories and novels, illustrating her own works. Beginning in the 1930s, she incorporated Latvian mythology in her works. During the Soviet era she adapted to socialist realism but was expelled from the artist union for most of the 1950s. She was married to the writer Viktors Eglītis.

Early life and education Hildegarde Natālija Vīka, known as Hilda Vīka, was born in Riga on 5 November 1897. Her parents were the civil servant Otto Vīka and Elvīne Vīka (born Blosfelde). The father died when she was seven and she spent a part of her childhood in the countryside outside Dobele, where her mother's parents lived. She moved back to Riga when the mother remarried. Due to her mother's German ancestry, Vīka went to a German girls' school.

During World War I, Vīka served as an assistant nurse, worked as an educator and maid in Russia, Poland and Lithuania, and completed a course in accounting. While working she took art classes at the in 1920–1922 and studied under the painters Romans Suta (1921–1922), Augusts Zauers (1922–1925) and Uga Skulme (1925–1927). In the 1930s and 1940s, she made multi-colour watercolour and oil paintings of scenes from everyday life and dreamy visions, typically with women as central figures. The paintings are stylised and inspired by geometrical ornaments. She followed the conventions of Art Deco, trying to combine restraint, graceful body language, repetition and vitality. After World War II, she adapted to the socialist realism mandated by the Soviet Union. She was expelled from the in 1950 "for remnants of formalism in her oeuvre" but was readmitted in 1957. Vīka's husband died in a Soviet prison in April 1945, having been arrested while attempting to preserve her paintings.

In the postwar period, Vīka lived in poverty, spending winters painting in Riga and summers in Dobele. Her mother died in 1950 and Anšlavs went into exile, leaving Vidvuds as her only relative in the country. There is a street in Dobele named after Vīka. In 2021, the town announced a plan to create a cultural centre in her honour, located near the Dobele art school. More than 90 of her works are in the collection of Dobele's local history museum. To celebrate Vīka's 125th birthday in 2022, Latvijas Pasts released a postage stamp block featuring her and her works as part of its series Outstanding Latvian Artists.

Publications Bibliography adapted from Literatura.lv.

Poetry Spožie ūdeņi, 1932 Mēnesnīca, 1935 Zelta briedis, 1944

Prose Stāsti, 1934 Atsegtas dvēseles, 1935 Mūzu vaimanas, 1937 Lielā slāpe, 1940 Lielā taisnība, 1942 Laimīgā dziesma, 1942 Dievišķā vientiesība, 1944 Naudas vara, 1944