He knew where dreams live

More than 50 paintings and graphic works by Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (1875-1911) are on display at the exhibition. He was a unique figure in the art world. Ciurlionis was both an artist and a founding composer of professional Lithuanian music, whose creativity expanded the boundaries of national and world culture. According to Romain Rolland, “his brilliant, inimitable works showed the world the way to a new spiritual continent.”

During the artist’s short life of just 35 years, he created about 300 works in the Modernist and Art Nouveau styles, combining the symbolist influences with elements of folk arts and crafts, borrowings and allusions from Japanese, Egyptian, and Indian cultures. In addition, Ciurlionis authored the first Lithuanian symphonic poems, cantatas for chorus and orchestra, and a cappella psalm chorales. He also recorded and edited more than 60 Lithuanian folk songs and created more than 200 works for piano. It is said he knew where dreams live and when angels smile.

“Ciurlionis continues to be a figure of interest for the art world, because he had a very distinctive vision of Symbolism and realized it in the fine arts, music, and poetry,” the art critic Roman Yatsiv told The Day. “Unexpectedly, he made a great service to Ukrainian art, too, as his exhibition in Moscow, and then in Kyiv, led many artists to follow his example and turn to the deep, mythological foundations of national culture. To offer a few parallels, the Ukrainian modernist Yukhym Mykhailiv, fascinated by Ciurlionis’s philosophy and views on art, created his own and very interesting vision of Ukrainian history, landscape, traditions, songs, etc., basing many of his works on symphonies and sonatas. The modernist painter Kost Piskorsky was infatuated with the Lithuanian’s works, too, and alluded to Ciurlionis’s motifs despite being an urbanist. I am now studying the Ukrainian graphic artist, painter and art critic Pavlo Kovzhun, who dedicated his first work to Ciurlionis, naming it A Tribute to Ciurlionis. Therefore, we see that Ciurlionis proposed quite a program for the arts, urging artists to enter much deeper, more metaphysical, cosmic orbits in search of their place in the world as well as intertemporal and interspatial links...”

Exhibition will last at the Lviv Palace of Arts at 17 Kopernyka Street until February 1.