Art Museum of Estonia (KUMU)

This guide to the Art Museum of Estonia, KUMU, in Tallinn opens with a Soviet-era propaganda painting whose crowd dissolves into swirls of color under closer looking. It follows Estonian painters like Elmar Kits who kept banned impressionist brushwork alive inside approved socialist-realist scenes after 1948, and curator Eha Komisarov's search decades later for a paper trail that was never written down, because admitting it could end a career. Richard Uutmaa kept working in the same hidden style through the 1950s, painting nocturnal seas nobody in Moscow would have approved.