|
C u l t u r a l
e v e n t s Čiurlionis in Paris and Grenoble
by OSVALDAS DAUGELIS Of all the best places abroad for an exhibition of the work of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911), Paris was always mentioned as one of the most desirable. Paris has been the dream of several generations of artists, an almost Arcadian city, the capital of the arts, a site of pilgrimage for people from all over the world in search of beauty and inspiration. But for decades a lack of interest in Čiurlionis' work on the part of curators, administrators and critics seemed to offer no chance for this dream to come true. Few people actually knew about the life and art of the Lithuanian artist and composer very well, and eventually this was to show. In everyday reality Paris is a huge international metropolis, busy with mundane worries and preoccupations, sinking in the sins of a seductive nightlife. To be mentioned and noticed here is not so easy, and maybe such a universal recognition is not needed at all. Another big problem is to find and meet people with the goodwill to help and support in presenting this artist, who has been overlooked for so many years. It is not so easy to reveal such a complicated artist and find the right moment, because the art of Čiurlionis needs great concentration in order to get deep into the world of his visions and ideas. But a selection of 90 works out of 220 (of what we can call paintings, as sometimes they are rather small sketch-like pieces) were finally taken from the M.K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art in Kaunas to one of the most important museums in France, the Musée d'Orsay, which has an international following. It is a huge place, a former railway station, like an art factory, offering a variety of attractions, and not everybody likes it, especially Parisians; but, anyway, it is attended mostly by an international public, and this obviously gives another dimension to the exhibition. It was prepared with great attention and care by both sides, in Kaunas and in Paris. The French museum gathered a group of ten journalists to visit Lithuania as guests of the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture. Three days was a very short time, but almost all of them got some homework, a bag with books, catalogues, CDs and photographs, and fulfilled their task very well. By the opening of the exhibition, on 6 November, you could buy at least three art magazines with articles on the life and work of Čiurlionis, in connection with the exhibition in the Musée d'Orsay. The M.K. Čiurlionis National Museum prepared most of the catalogue, and fought the bureaucratic red tape that usually accompanies big exhibitions. The largest ever retrospective of paintings and graphics by Čiurlionis was mounted in an extremely short time, but was still an enormously successful event, and commemorated the 125th anniversary of his birth. Hardly anyone could have expected that the most respected artist in Lithuania, after several decades of neglect in the West, would be celebrated in what is probably the second most important gallery in France. Today it is not easy to estimate, let alone overestimate, the importance of the presentation of Čiurlionis' work in France (in Paris and Grenoble), as the exhibition and concerts were reviewed not only by French cultural magazines and newspapers, and international dailies such as The International Herald Tribune, Corriere della Sera, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Chicago Tribune, Gazeta Wyborcza, but also by specialised art publications from various countries as well, among which The Burlington Magazine, which has been published in London for over 100 years, is undoubtedly the most important (No 1176, Vol. CXLIII, March 2001, p. 177–180). Elisabeth Clegg, the author of the review, noted that "France has been a latecomer to the largerly German-led ‘rediscovery' of his oeuvre as a product of Lithuania. This was, nonetheless, a triply appropriate site in which to undertake an early twenty-first-century reappraisal: politically (the show opened in the last months of the French presidency of the EU, as this body formally embraced its commitment to eastward expansion); geoculturally (the city was simultaneously examining the early decades of the ‘École de Paris', one of the more successful solutions to the dilemma of Central/Eastern European artistic identity); and institutionally (the Musée d'Orsay being incomparably well equipped to accommodate the musical half of Čiurlionis' career and its crucial component of musical-pictorial cross-fertilization, which is also the subject of one of the essays in the exhibition catalogue" (p. 178). After the successful show in Paris the whole collection was transferred to the Musée de Grenoble, one of the most beautiful new museums in France outside Paris, which opened in 1994. The final month of the tour of the Čiurlionis exhibition in France was paid for by the Grenoble municipality and was a good act of mutual cooperation, as Grenoble is a twin city of Kaunas, the second largest town in Lithuania. This may serve as some of the evidence showing the importance
and distinctiveness of the project supported by the presidents of Lithuania
and France, during which so many splendid works forming the core of
the Čiurlionis collection were put on display. Compared with the usual
international practice of museums, the project was implemented in a
surprisingly short period of time, thus breaking into the strict exhibition
schedule of the Musée d'Orsay – one of the most prestigious
museums in the world. |
