Kumu is a stylized portmanteau of the Estonian words kunsti muuseum, museum of art. Estonians shorten things; the contraction makes sense in a country where the language has only about a million native speakers and most words are doing several jobs at once. The Art Museum of Estonia was founded on 17 November 1919, ten months after the country declared independence, and it spent its first century homeless. It moved into Kadriorg Palace in 1921, was evicted in 1929 when the palace became the head of state's residence, and then bounced through temporary spaces before returning to Kadriorg in 1946 under Soviet occupation. By 1991, when Estonia regained independence, the palace had fallen into near-ruin. The new parliament voted to build something purpose-made.

Construction took three years, from 2003 to 2006. Vapaavuori's design wraps a curved exterior around the limestone outcrop, the copper cladding aging now to a green patina that matches the trees. Inside, the building works as a vertical journey: the ground floor opens to Kadriorg Park, with auditorium and cafe; the first floor opens onto Lasnamäe with its parking, terrace, and temporary exhibitions wing. Above those, the floors stack the chronology of Estonian art. Second floor: classics from the 18th century to the end of World War II. Third floor: the long, complicated period from 1945 to 1991, the years when Estonia was a Soviet republic. Fourth floor: contemporary art, after 1991. You climb through Estonian history one staircase at a time.

The collection is the most thorough in the country. Carl Timoleon von Neff and Oskar Hoffmann represent the 19th-century Baltic German painters who worked in Estonia when there was no independent Estonia to belong to. Ants Laikmaa and Konrad Mägi belong to the generation that built a national painting tradition in the early 20th century, drawing on European modernism while painting Estonian landscapes and Estonian faces. Mägi in particular, who died young in 1925, is the painter most Estonians would name as their greatest, his vivid landscapes of Saaremaa and Norway hanging at the heart of the museum. Oskar Kallis, Jaan Koort, Henn Roode, Johannes Greenberg, Julia Hagen-Schwarz: each name maps a piece of Estonian visual identity, threads in a tradition that the Soviet years tried hard to bury.

The third floor is where Kumu does its hardest work. From 1945 to 1991 Estonian artists lived under Soviet occupation, and the museum shows what that meant. There is Socialist realism, the official, state-approved style of factory workers and grain harvests and Lenin in profile. There is also Soviet Nonconformist art, the unofficial work made privately by artists who refused the state aesthetic and risked their careers, sometimes their freedom, to do so. Both belong to the same decades and the same artists, sometimes the same person painting one thing for the state and another for himself. To put them in the same gallery is to refuse the easy story. Estonia under Soviet rule was not a black-and-white binary; it was complicated and compromised and quietly resistant in ways that took shape on canvas long before they took shape in politics.

Kumu won the European Museum of the Year Award in 2008, which placed a small Baltic capital's art museum on the same prize list as institutions in London and Berlin. The recognition mattered: the building proved that a country of 1.3 million people could produce world-class cultural infrastructure when it set its mind to it. The museum also showed up in unlikely places. In Christopher Nolan's 2020 film Tenet, the building stood in for the fictional Oslo Freeport, its curved interior corridors put to use in an action sequence. Most days, though, Kumu does the quiet work of a national art museum: showing Estonian visitors their own visual history, showing foreign visitors what Estonian art looks like, holding the long story together one floor at a time.