Girl in a Folk Costume

Jānis Tīdemanis trained at the Antwerp Royal Academy of Art from 1922 till 1927 and continued his studies until 1934 under Isidore Opsomer at the National Institute of Fine Arts in Antwerp. In Belgium Tīdemanis was influenced by Flemish Expressionism and in between the wars, he became the main figure in the relations between Latvian and Belgian art. His formal and iconographic innovations of the 1930s influenced by the Belgian modernists led him to become an atypical representative of modernism in the local art scene who encouraged the revival of the expressive tradition.