Description of the attraction
Kaunas Museum was established in 1921. In 1936, the modest gallery was turned into a large museum of culture named after Vitovt. Since 1944, the museum has been named after Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911).
M. K. Čiurlionis is the pride of Lithuanian art, who made it an integral part of world art. He did not separate his musical creativity from the painting. The heyday of creativity fell on the era of Scriabin and Vrubel. Čiurlionis was a musician in painting, a painter in music and a mystic in both. Composer's work chronologically also coincides with the artistic one. The best known are his symphonic poems In the Forest, written in 1900, and The Sea, completed in 1907. In the years 1903-1908, Čiurlionis created almost all of his paintings.
The museum is dedicated to the works of the famous Lithuanian artist and composer. Here are a large number of his paintings, documents related to life and work, and recordings of symphonic works, which can be listened to in the music hall.
However, the museum presents not only the exposition of the great master, but also a magnificent collection of folk wooden sculpture and painting of the last century. It is impossible to look without delight at the simultaneously ingenuous and high art of unknown Lithuanian masters. For example, in one of the paintings you can see the praying Saint Isidore, who is considered the patron saint of the peasantry. The artist depicted a kneeling saint, his wide-brimmed hat, taken off and neatly placed next to him before reciting a prayer, as well as another object of great importance - a rake, which, apparently, should assure the viewer that the saint truly belongs to a common people … The episode in the lower right corner of the canvas clearly hints that thanks to prayer, plowing is better argued. While Saint Isidore reads a prayer, the angel himself helps him, walking across the field for a plow.
The museum's collection also includes collections of Lithuanian painting of the 17th - early 20th centuries. Among the old anonymous paintings, the most interesting are the portraits of the Polish nobility. In the halls of the beginning of the 20th century, 2 small paintings can be distinguished, belonging to the pen of Mstislav Dobuzhinsky.
But, despite all the richness of the exposition, the collection of works by M. K. Čiurlionis is considered the heart of the Kaunas museum. Čiurlionis, like Scriabin, believed in the mysterious inner transformation of humanity through art. Entering the Kaunas Museum, you plunge into a special mysterious world invented by Čiurlionis, where the top and bottom shift, the force of gravity does not exist, the ships hang in the sky, and on the seabed there is an ordinary Lithuanian village, a world where the day is terrible and the night brings peace. It is such a fantastic, not biblical creation of the world that is born in 13 paintings of the cycle of the same name, which became one of the main works of Čiurlionis presented in the exhibition.
Music and painting are combined in the famous "Sonatas" by Čiurlionis. These are three-part or four-part cycles. Looking at them, you never get tired of wondering how the artist managed to convey the musical correlation of elements: a stormy and agitated Allegro, a slow and smooth Andante, a light rude Scherzo and a fast dance and at the same time sublime Finale.
And in the painting "Fugue" musical laws are intricately intertwined and, as is often the case with a professional, a living, disorderly and yet almost unreal forest mysteriously answers an inverted, light and musically ordered forest in the skies.
Čiurlionis created his own, completely extraordinary world, which for 100 years has been causing delight, surprise, admiration and controversy. The museum will warmly welcome everyone who wishes to enjoy this extraordinary art.
Description added:
L. Krol 2018-08-04
M. K. Čiurlionis is very dear to me. and your Museum is beautiful, but I experienced another shock in it - the works of Elzbieta Daugvilene. Unfortunately. nothing. except for a small article by art critic E. Zemaitytė "Sculpture from birch bark" with a story about this amazing artist.
Show all text Creativity of M. K. Čiurlionis is very dear to me. and your Museum is beautiful, but I experienced another shock in it - the works of Elzbieta Daugvilene. Unfortunately. nothing. except for a small article by art critic E. Zemaitytė "Sculpture from birch bark" with a story about this amazing artist. could not be found.. Sincerely L. Krol Saratov
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