Tartu City Museum and Theater “Vanemuine” are collaborating on an exhibition “My Fair Sander” about life and creation of a legendary stage and costume artist Georg Sander. This year we are celebrating 100 years from Sander’s (1923–2016) birth.
Georg Sander was a theater artist with a remarkably long creative career, whose life’s work between 1947 and 1996 was performed at the Theater “Vanemuine”. Sander’s first profession was an accountant, he received the corresponding call after graduating from the Tartu Commercial High School in 1941. However, the interest in theater and visual arts inherited from his parents led him to the Theater “Vanemuine” in 1945, initially to decorate the painting hall. In 1947, he was also entrusted with his first independent artistic work, in the children’s play “Beautiful Vassilissa”. That experience gave him the courage to study the theater art at a professional level – initially painting, later theater decoration at the Estonian National Art Institute, which he graduated in 1955 and where his teachers were the true masters of that era, Natalie Mei and Voldemar Haas.
Being modest by nature, Georg Sander refrained from longer interviews and appeared rather rarely at exhibitions of theater artists. In 2013, on the occasion of Sander’s 90th birthday, his only known personal exhibition “Theatre and Art” was held at the Museum of Theater and Music. This exhibition here, which at the suggestion of the current employees of the “Vanemuine” painting hall, was titled “My Fair Sander”, is compiled mainly based on the designs found in the archive of the Theater “Vanemuine”, as well as individual production sketches found in the Theater and Music Museum.
The exhibition is open from September 7, 2023 to January 28, 2024.