Čiurlionis as painter
Museum Belvédère is the first museum in the Netherlands to dedicate an exhibition to the work of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911). Čiurlionis is Lithuania's most important composer and visual artist. Art historians compare him to contemporaries such as Gustav Klimt, Edvard Munch and Wassily Kandinsky.
Although Čiurlionis' work remained virtually unknown in the West during the years when Lithuania was part of the Soviet Union, many major museums around the world have devoted exhibitions to him in recent decades. In 2024, Museum Belvédère will offer this unique double talent a stage in the Netherlands. The emphasis of the exhibition is on Čiurlionis' later works, painted with tempera paint, in which he finds a symbiosis between visual art and music.
At the beginning of the last century, Čiurlionis developed his own symbolic style, drawing on Lithuanian sagas, myths, fairy tales and folk beliefs, as well as non-Western cultures ranging from Ancient Egyptian, Indian to Asian. Using drawing as a basis, Čiurlionis created many tempera paintings in which secrets are evoked and the earthly world is connected to the supernatural.
Instead of reality - as we (re)know it - his work depicts another world. This representation of unprecedented images and worlds runs like a thread through his work. He was never concerned with abstractions, but with the mentally imaginable.
