In June-July 1928, three Estonian artists had an exhibition in Tallinn: painters Adamson-Eric and Kristjan Teder, and the graphic artist Eduard Wiiralt. All three were either continuing their training in Paris or were still living there. They had already had a joint exhibition in May at the Blomquist gallery in Oslo. In 1924, Adamson-Eric had left the Charlottenburg art and crafts school in Berlin and moved to Paris; Eduard Wiiralt lived there from autumn 1925, and between 1926 and 1928 Teder studied there. From the mid-1920s onwards a number of Estonian artists lived in Paris, for longer or shorter periods of time depending upon their circumstances. Having studied with such artists as Charles Guerin, Roger Bissière, Moise Kisling, and André Lhote, Adamson-Eric soon moved over to the private academy run by the Russian Vassili Shuhhayev. In the light of the 1925 international exhibition of industrial and decorative art, he felt inclined towards a strong, stylistically determined school of drawing. Other Estonians joined him there, including Arnold Kalmus, Aleksander Vardi and Kristjan Teder. Shuhhayev, together with his friend Aleksander Jakovlev, represented the neo-classicist manner already apparent in the pre-First World War Russian art, which included characteristic features of the 1920s style - neue Sachlichkeit and art déco.

 

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In a review of the 1928 exhibition, art critic Hanno Kompus detected in the paintings of Adamson-Eric and Kristjan Teder, "a tendency that turns away from lyrical subjectivism/expressionism in order to conquer the world of reality/die neue Sachlichkeit." "The painting of topics, rejected ever since expressionism, is returning,"_ he argued, describing another, even newer tendency revealed in Adamson-Eric's still lifes. In his paintings - full of every imaginable kind of broken, dusty old stuff and various banal items - those that followed an exhibition of 1928 became known as 'dustbin poetry'. The artist's focus started to shift from 'topic painting' to the purely picturesque, the problems of colouring, chiaroscuro and texture, in the spirit of the French school. This was the period when Estonian art was moving from the sphere of German influence to that of the French.

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