Rainer Budde

The chances are that you will never see any of these paintings - mostly vivid guache on paper - unless you visit the museum in Kaunas named after the artist himself: they are in a style entirely of their own, expressionistic, perhaps with hints of early Kandinsky or Chagal: some of them - depicting what look like watch-towers or strange Temple-like constructions from which sacrificial offerings pour forth heavy plumes of smoke - seem like disturbing portents of the future which Ciurlionis, surely, can't quite have foreseen. The subtitle of this selection of the paintings which was chosen for a rare exhibition in the West, describing the world as a great symphony, is not a curatorial conceit: in the gallery in Kaunas these pictures are accompanied by recordings of the sonatas which Ciurlionis composed as a musical parallel to his painted work; although neither the music nor the art is in the first league, it is, with its almost childlike playfulness and its sinister undercurrents, worth searching out if you are ever in Lithuania. And they will both, perhaps, continue to haunt you long after your return home.… (altro)