Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis

Both painter and composer, Mikailojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis is considered to be the founder of Lithuanian modern art and he was as such the cultural emblem of independent Lithuania (1918-1940). Yet his work remains little-known in France: it is exhibited for the first time at the Musée d'Orsay.

Symbolist? Post-romantic? Pioneer of abstraction? Master of "Art Nouveau"? M.K. Ciurlionis was all of these, just as he was a neo-classicist in some aspects of his musical work, while resisting all attempts at oversimplifying classification. A mystical pantheist, he was above all a visionary thinker, like Goya before him, and a precursor. One can find in his work the roots of different trends that were to take shape in European art after his death.

He influenced a variety of Russian artists of his time, in particular Malevich, as well as central and Eastern European painters such as Kandinsky, despite the latter's partisans' attempts to deny the connection.

M.K. Ciurlionis's innovate streak emerged early on and he started to compose while still a teenager. In Sefaa Esec (1904), a cycle of variations on nine sounds presented in a strictly identical order, he preceded A. Schoenberg in the road to conceptual constructivism and he created a personal polyphonic style.

After enrolling in the newly opened Warsaw School of Art in 1904, he was mainly preoccupied with the interaction and synthesis of musical and pictorial forms of expression towards a universal and unique art; he endeavoured to translate his love of nature by integrating colours in musical composition: The Sea (1908) and Musical Landscapes (performed in Saint-Petersburg in 1909) illustrate this approach and, more than once, he composed pieces without even a piano at his disposal. His predilection for the sonata, which he considered a universal form of expression, prompted him to apply his musical architecture to his pictorial approach. He defined many of his paintings as "painted sonatas" - the first, in particular the famous Spring Sonata, were painted in 1907 - whilst tackling the visual translation of other musical forms such as the prelude or the fugue.

The totality of M.K. Ciurlionis's painted work was produced during six years of feverish creation (1903-1909), after which he fell irretrievably into depression and died at the age of 36. His taste for Eastern philosophy and the ancient Egyptian cult of the sun, which was characteristic of Polish society of the beginning of the century, but also the symbols of Lithuanian paganism, that worshiped the forces of nature and the plant kingdom and that existed until the end of the 14th century, find echoes in M.K. Ciurlionis's work.

Like his contemporaries of the Young Poland movement, he was passionately involved in the Lithuanian renaissance that developed at the end of the 19th century and the struggle for a return to national language and culture.
Following the third division of Poland (1895), Lithuania, annexed to Russia, had been written off the map. As he associated himself with a deeply Lithuanian art based on rural popular tradition, the artist's sketchbooks abounded in sculpted crosses he saw on the roadside, buildings, pieces of furniture, ornaments, all of which he used in his paintings (Cemetery, 1909).

In the Kings' Tale (1909) the offering, suffused with vertical beams, the Queen hands out to her husband is a tiny farm surrounded with trees.

Although he reached a certain notoriety during his lifetime, M.K. Ciurlionis did not succeed in selling his works. The Kaunas national museum that bears his name thus holds almost all his pictorial creation, as well as his musical scores and manuscripts. The 90 or so paintings, engravings and drawings exhibited in Paris represent nearly half his production. This retrospective is a world-wide premiere: most of M.K. Ciurlionis's work has never left Lithuania, and because of the poor quality of the materials (tempera, watercolour, often on paper) used by the artist due to his financial hardships, most of the artworks are extremely fragile so this event could well be unique.
Ugné Karvelis, extraordinary and plenipotentiary ambassador, permanent delegate of Lithuania at the UNESCO.