Exhibition dedicated to 100th death anniversary of M. K. Čiurlionis

Ladies and gentlemen,

thank you for coming to meet Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis in living arts and other biographical presentation.

Čiurlionis and his artistic legacy came more than 100 years ago as an event not of local but universal significance, even if it stayed for a long decades little known or undiscovered.

His creation is a vision and message about human being in an endless space and time beyond us, who are not lost, surprisingly – and the very ability to take and transfer such approaches artistically into a real sense of life, still goes on discovering the beauty and building rules of our visible or non-visible, internal universe.

Look, tells us Čiurlionis, the fragility and short time given for our joyful-painful existence does have a place in an eternity out of limits, which is not threatening thereof, but great.

"You have made me endless", that simple notion by Rabindranath Tagore does correspond fully the contents of Čiurlionis' arts and music.

The very music, an imagination, the every motion of soul and mind, including the lesson of a fairy tale, is a language to be used for overwhelming understanding of our being together now, here and forever.

Let us take now the picture from the beginning of the selection presented, the painting which has a title "The fairy tale" or "The tale of Kings". You will see there, indeed, the couple of giant kings inside of a prehistorian or cosmic forest. On their palms they hold the simplest human dwelling – the poor village hamlet with a dawn around, probably the Lithuania itself, – but the same way of true symbolism it may be the entire life of our little, just born planet as well, and as a backing concept we have there a cosmic and divine modification of an old story about the Holy Family.

Go, enjoy and learn, that is Čiurlionis with no difference, are you travelling in arts or across the fields and forests.

And then take his painted sonatas with musical architecture and premeditated developments (the "Sonata of the Sea" is dispersed here somewhere), or, at least, the small picture on the back side of that wall at the right.

There are "The Flowers", the vital spiritual offsprings from the magma or chaos of subconsciousness, but how mighty and full of pain is their fragile blossoming!

Now I am going to pick up some other flowers from Čiurlionis' music garden. They are preludes for piano, and among them you will listen two Lithuanian folk songs picked up by composer in his native fields.

Vytautas Landsbergis

Council of Europe, Strasbourg, 16-11-2011