Kurts Fridrihsons (1911-1991) was a Latvian painter, a personality venerated for the artistic quality and intellectual independence of his work. Before the Second World War, he spent some time in Paris, where he made friends in artistic circles, including the writer André Gide and the painter André Derain. In the autumn of 1945, Fridrihsons and a group of friends in Riga initiated informal meetings, a kind of literary salon, on Mondays, to discuss literature and art. These meetings continued until approximately mid-1947. In January 1951, 12 people were arrested and sentenced to seven to 25 years in the Gulag; among other charges, they were accused of establishing and participating in the above-mentioned meetings, named by chekists as a ‘reactionary anti-Soviet group’. Fridrihsons was sentenced to 25 years. He spent his imprisonment in 1951-1956 in Gulag camps in the Omsk oblast. There he made friends with fellow inmates from an artistic and intellectual background, such as the Russian Nikolai Gumilev, and the Lithuanians Antanas Kučingis and Vincas Steponavičius. He used all the possibilities to improve his professional skills, and to maintain his intellectual integrity. He asked his wife to send materials for drawing and painting in watercolours. It has been said that he made a lot of portraits of his fellow inmates in postcard format that they sent home instead of photographs. And he made 3,500 watercolour paintings. A total of 1,476 of them were donated to the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia in 2003 and 2006 by his heirs Gundega Repše and Jānis Spalviņš. Fridrihsons' watercolour paintings were partly inspired by the environment of the camp, but most of them reflect associations with literature and drama, images of the Middle East, Native Americans and Scandinavia, and memories of France and Latvia. After his return to Riga, Fridrihsons was largely ignored by Soviet Latvian art authorities; he had his first personal exhibition only in 1969. But he was always at the centre of intellectual life in Latvia, and he had quite considerable informal intellectual influence.