Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, the Lithuanian painter, composer, and writer born 150 years ago, anticipated the artistic visions of M.C. Escher, Salvador Dalí, and Giorgio de Chirico by decades. His groundbreaking work between 1903 and 1909 presented surrealistic imagery that would not become mainstream until thirty years later.
In Čiurlionis's paintings, clouds form into figures pointing with their fingers, forests creep over horizons and grip the fields with knuckle-like tree clusters, raising their treetops like a great green man lifting his head. His painting "The Silence" shows a mountain literally emerging from the sea, with two lights above the shoreline serving as its eyes. This visual interpretation of the metaphor of "emerging" demonstrates how Čiurlionis transformed linguistic imagery into stunning visual reality.
The artist's work shows remarkable parallels to German Romantic poetry, particularly Eduard Mörike's poem "Um Mitternacht" (At Midnight), which begins: "Calmly night climbed onto land, leaning dreamily against the mountain wall, its eye now sees the golden scale of time resting quietly in equal pans." Čiurlionis, who spoke German well thanks to his mother's teaching, seemed to draw inspiration from such verses, creating images of night as a mountain rising to the shore of a lake, with two eyes balanced horizontally above the water's surface.
Born on September 22, 1875, in the southeastern Lithuanian town of Varėna as the son of an organist, Čiurlionis is considered Lithuania's most significant artist, possessing immense multiple talents as painter, composer, and writer. His painting cycles including "Spring Sonata," "Star Sonata," "Sun Sonata," and "Zodiac" work with spatial layering like transparent tulle sheets extending into infinity. These works anticipate the physically impossible stair labyrinths of Maurits Cornelis Escher by decades, created when the Dutch graphic artist was only eight years old.
Čiurlionis's gravity-defying column rows, floating viaducts, and pyramids, which could be crowned by gigantic angels or remain empty of human presence, represent examples of pittura metafisica avant la lettre. Giorgio de Chirico, to whom art history credits this concept, was thirteen years younger than Čiurlionis.
The artist grew up in the forest and water-rich landscape between the Memel and Šešupė rivers, a region that became literature in Hermann Sudermann's stories. During his childhood, music, nature, and ancient pagan customs intermingled, always emerging during the summer solstice. This fairy-tale world of Baltic Yarilo cult, which inspired Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's operas and his student Igor Stravinsky's ballet "The Rite of Spring," later appeared in Čiurlionis's paintings as bearded wise men before magical light sources and ornaments of Lithuanian folk carving.
The greatest natural experience awaited him when he came to Palanga with Polish Count Michał Ogiński's school orchestra: the Baltic Sea. The ocean became his life symbol par excellence. "I want to write a symphony from the murmur of waves, the mysterious whisper of a hundred-year-old forest, from the sparkle of stars, from our songs and my endless longing," he wrote in 1908.
Čiurlionis studied composition in Warsaw, where he was trained in an academic Chopin tradition, reflected in his early mazurkas and preludes. However, he read works by Oscar Wilde, Henrik Ibsen, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Verlaine, and Maurice Maeterlinck, engaging with music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and Richard Wagner. Like his contemporary group Young Poland, including Karol Szymanowski and Mieczysław Karłowicz, he shared a fiery admiration for Richard Strauss, which deepened when he continued his composition studies in Leipzig with Carl Reinecke and Salomon Jadassohn.
Čiurlionis absorbed Symbolism from France and Belgium not only literarily but probably also through paintings by Polish artists like Jacek Malczewski, Józef Mehoffer, Witold Pruszkowski, and Artur Grottger. In St. Petersburg, where he stayed briefly from 1908, his painting gained appreciation from Russian colleagues like Mstislav Dobuzhinsky and Nicholas Roerich, who worked as a stage painter for the Ballets Russes. Early paintings by Wassily Kandinsky like "Moonlit Night" from 1907 or "Oaks and Dryads" by Kazimir Malevich are not far removed from Čiurlionis's pictorial worlds.
As a Lithuanian patriot, Čiurlionis lived when his country belonged partly to Prussia and partly to Russia. Literarily, he composed a hymn to his homeland along the Memel River (Lithuanian: Nemunas): "Above those shores, above the dearest Nemunas, the sky is so clear, so gentle, so Lithuanian – one looks and looks and cannot get enough. The heart beats faster, the soul strikes up a song, a hymn to Him who gave us Lithuania as our fatherland." Though he originally spoke Polish and learned Lithuanian later, his connection to his homeland remained profound.
Čiurlionis appreciated the same quality in his homeland's landscape as in the folk music he collected and arranged: apparent eventlessness. He wrote: "Beautiful is our Lithuania. Beautiful through its sadness, beautiful through its simplicity and warmth. Here there are no mountains reaching to the sky, no rushing waterfalls; just look around! How touchingly simple this picture is." About folk songs, he noted: "What are our songs, and what must we particularly value in them? The unaccustomed ear of the stranger initially perceives much uniformity – monotony, but that comes from the rhythm. The monotony of rhythm is one of the most important and – I dare say – the most beautiful characteristic of our songs."
Čiurlionis's paintings have repeatedly caused great but brief sensations in Western Europe before being quickly forgotten. There were exhibitions in Berlin during the 1979 Festival, in Berlin and Brussels in 1991, in Cologne in 1998, and in Heringsdorf in 2011 with high-quality reproductions. Art historically, they could hardly unfold any effect because they were not present early enough and not permanently in Latin Europe – the Europe of Carolingian dominance, Charlemagne's empire and its successor states – where decisions are made about what is new and important.
In East Germany, however, Čiurlionis was known through an exemplary illustrated book that Gytis Vaitkūnas published in 1975 with Dresden's Verlag der Kunst. Berlin composer Ellen Hünigen wrote music for cello, horn, piano, and percussion in 1988, inspired by the sophisticated proportions in Čiurlionis's musically structured paintings.
The second reason for his lack of recognition lies in the light sensitivity of his paintings, often created with tempera on paper due to lack of money for expensive materials. His luminous paintings are kept light-protected in the Čiurlionis Museum in Kaunas like in a defiant national shrine. Foreign exhibitions are becoming increasingly rare for conservation reasons.
Musicologist and pianist Vytautas Landsbergis dedicated his research life to composer Čiurlionis until he courageously and rhetorically led Lithuania to independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 as a gifted politician. Čiurlionis's piano works range from Chopin-esque miniatures through harsh-edged folk song arrangements to the late Sea Sonata Op. 28, which, like the music of his contemporary Alexander Scriabin, ventures into free atonality.
His two symphonic poems "In the Forest" and "The Sea" follow dramaturgies of wandering observation rather than literary narrative. The inspiration from Strauss is unmistakable, the temporal proximity to Claude Debussy – while maintaining independence from his music – is noteworthy, and proximity to Antonín Dvořák and Gustav Mahler perhaps typical of the era.
At the Musikfest Berlin, Lithuanian conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla brought Čiurlionis's "The Sea" to the Berlin Philharmonie with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, marking a historic event for Lithuania's recognition as a cultural nation. Together with her sister, conductor Onutė Gražinytė, she has released a new recording of Čiurlionis's orchestral works on Deutsche Grammophon and produced a program in the "Interpretations" series on Deutschlandfunk Kultur on the eve of the composer's 150th birthday.
The recognition Čiurlionis found in Russia encouraged him to marry and start a family. However, he never saw his daughter grow up. Due to years of overwork, Čiurlionis fell into exhaustion depression in 1910. He was taken to a sanatorium near Warsaw. In spring 1911, the thirty-five-year-old was found confused and hypothermic in the forest. He died on April 10, 1911, from pneumonia.
Despite Čiurlionis's tragic end, his art remains life-affirming and bright – a Symbolism without décadence. "One must have light within oneself," he once wrote, "to shine for others who do not know where they should go." His legacy continues to inspire, representing Lithuania's profound contribution to European art and culture.
