Donna Lacroix Fired From Taps

Ciurlionis. One of the fathers of the abstract, of the Creed of the avant garde. DID YOU KNOW? PETER

who had crossed the threshold of Palazzo Reale in Milan during the first major exhibition dedicated to the artist in Italy, in 2011 (the second event in Europe after the the Musée d'Orsay in Paris ), he discovered that the art history, if you still had doubts, was written by merchants.

Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (Varena 1875 - Pustelnik 1911) was an artist and a fine and innovative musician who died too soon, too far from the economic heart of Europe, but that within five years, between 1904 and 1909, he has done more for the art of 900 well-known that 20 academies. An artist

ethereal and elegant, able to dare the abstract and first encode the same Kandinskji symbolism, half way between Nabi and avant-garde.
But he was Lithuanian, and then, almost did not count anything in the great game of art. To understand
this complex, we leave a comment to Michael De Luca, who wrote of him in the exhibition Milan:

C iurlionis was a great Lithuanian painter and musician, at the age of three years he moved with his family in Druskininkai, where he spent his childhood. At the age of seven years learning, thanks to his father's musician, without any effort to read music, and began his musical training at the Prince's Orchestra Oginsky School (1882 to 1893), learning the flute and other instruments, then study, after six years in piano and composition at the Conservatory of Music in Warsaw and in this period also began to be interested in the natural sciences, history and literature. During his tenure at the Conservatory, he composed "De Profundis", a cantata for chorus and symphony orchestra. In the Polish capital, soon discovers even his strong interest in painting and enrolled, first at Kauzik's Drawing School and the Academy of Arts. It was very important for his work, he developed a new vision for the Bible and, anyway, for all religions in general.

Soon his paintings were exhibited in important exhibitions, but despite its popularity grows and his art immediately aroused great interest and attention, not it improves his economic condition, this situation of poverty almost led him to a growing mental instability that was because of his internment in 1909 in an asylum. To this was added to his release, including a state of progressive physical illness which led to a sudden death April 10, 1911. Ciurlionis was a singular example of sound-color synesthete, because he had the qualities to be able to perceive them simultaneously, as is clearly evidenced by his career and by the same name which was given to his artistic works. Taken as a country one of the founders of modern art, is almost unknown in the rest of the world, with the exception of France who dedicated in 2000-2001 at the Musée d'Orsay a first major retrospective.

is merit, therefore, a major exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan - the first ever in our country - curated by Gabriella Di Milia and Osvaldas Daugelis (at the initiative of the Fondazione Mazzotta who has also edited the catalog) Ten years after the exhibition in Paris, to revive this great character, exposing eighty tempera and pastels on canvas or cardboard master, in addition to thirty watercolors, ink and drawings, many photographs and documents (including a collection of unpublished letters a) from a temple "secret" of modern art, namely the National Museum of Fine Arts Kaunas in Lithuania. "A journey esoteric" - the title of the exhibition - is therefore to bridge a gap, but also to pay off a debt to an extraordinary artist as unusual and mysterious to her painting, the singularity of his visions, painted "furiously, forgetting himself, without giving respite. " Condensed in just seven years (1902 to 1909), his work influenced many painters of his time and was appreciated by Stravinsky and the Nobel Prize for Literature Romain Rolland, who in 1930 admired the reproductions of his paintings on the Russian magazine "Apollon ". Kandinsky in turn, affected by some of Ciurlionis paintings exhibited in St. Petersburg, wrote in 1910 Lithuanian artist to invite to the exhibition of the Nene Künstlervereinigung of Monaco, but the letter came so late that Ciurlionis lost the opportunity to be known outside of his country. Solitary spirit of art, became famous for his visions of other worlds ", that few had the fortune to know before they were finally shown in Berlin during the Festival in the autumn of 1979.

A work of Frantisek Kupka, the artist who comes closest.