Exhibition of paintings by Povilas Puzinas (1907–1967), January 24–26, 2024

Friday, December 15, 6 p.m. An exhibition of paintings by Povilas Puzinas has been opened at the Kaunas District Museum (Pilies takas 1, Raudondvaris), where you can see the works stored in the collections of Gražina Petraitienė, Laura Petraitienė, the Lithuanian Art Knowledge Centre TARTLE and Dr. Jaunius Gumbys. Dr. Dalia Cidzikaitė, who studies the cultural heritage of the Lithuanian diaspora, notes that more than 50 years after the death of the artist Povilas Puzinas, many Lithuanian-Americans still consider him one of the best artists who created in the diaspora, but "in Lithuania, the name and works of Povilas Puzinas are not known to anyone, although some of the paintings of this artist are kept in Lithuanian museums."

According to art critic Lijana Natalevičienė, the exhibition opening in Raudondvaris Castle "exhibits paintings from different periods of P. Puzinas' work – from the early realistic landscape painted while still studying in Riga, the sunny landscapes of Lithuania during the interwar and war years to impressive compositions and seaside views created in the diaspora. The exhibition is like a diary, which reflects the creative path of the artist in search of himself. Here he observes a modest fragment of nature through the eyes of a novice painter, trying to realistically replicate its motifs, and after some time he tries to convey the essence of nature in generalized forms. The works of the first post-war decades, which dominate the exhibition, speak of the wanderings of a personality distracted by the storms of life, pausing at the eye-catching masterpieces of European architecture and diving deeper into the images of piers, the undulating sea, and the life of fishermen that mark the new artistic identity. There is an inner connection between these fragments of the world, there is no direct speech in them, there is room for imagination, people's faces and motifs are hidden in twilight and shadows."

Dr. D. Cizikaitė writes that "P. Puzinas is one of those rare cases when Lithuanians have to "share" the artist and his fame with another nation – Latvians. The artist was born in Riga in a family of Lithuanian emigrants. In 1920 he graduated from the Riga Lithuanian School, in 1921–1923 he studied at the School of Cultural Arts. From 1923 he studied at the Riga Academy of Arts as a freelance student, and from 1928, after receiving his maturity certificate, as a full-fledged student, he was a pupil of the famous Latvian landscape artist, art teacher, founder of the Latvian Academy of Arts and the first rector Vilhelms Purvītis (1972–1945). After becoming a graduate artist in 1932, Puzinas said goodbye to his hometown and connected the next years of his life and career with Lithuania."

Meanwhile, L. Natalevičienė notes that although the work of Puzin Puzinas, who graduated from the Riga Academy of Arts and lived in Latvia for a number of years, was formed away from the Lithuanian school of coloristic painting, the artist always emphasized that he looked at the world through the eyes of a Lithuanian. "I realized that we have nothing to imitate the artistic creation of other nations, we have to go our own way," he said in a 1952 interview with the daily Draugas. – Our region is not characterized by large cities with their boulevards and factories, but by farmers' homesteads, fields and forests. That attracted me at first; This is what I was best able to understand, empathize with, and depict in my work. It couldn't be any other way, because I was a baby of my country."

The fact that the artist first of all felt Lithuanian is also shown by the fact that when he arrived in Lithuania, Puzinas, as a citizen of the Republic of Lithuania, first performed a two-year military obligation. Dr. D. Cizikaitė points out that Puzinas "has been working as a drawing teacher at the Panevėžys Boys' Gymnasium since 1937. In his free time from work at the gymnasium, he decorated the Panevėžys Cathedral: he decorated the side naves with eight huge paintings based on the motifs of Michelangelo's frescoes from the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, and was engaged in the decoration of the ceiling of the central nave. He decorated the altar of the chapel of the Marian novitiate with three paintings, and painted portraits of pilots Darius and Girėnas for the church in Smilgiai (Biržai district). In 1940, after moving to Kaunas, he taught at the Kaunas Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts (now Kaunas Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts). Kaunas University of Applied Sciences). At the end of the war, he fled to Germany and lived in camps for displaced persons. The experiences experienced during the war and post-war years were also found in the artist's canvases, in such paintings as "Deportees", "Refugee", "Deportation" and others.

1947 Puzinas emigrated to the United States. At first he settled in New York, then went to the West Coast for several years. Here in 1949. In Hollywood, on the famous Sunset Boulevard, he opened an art studio. After returning to the East Coast, he taught at the Cattan Rose School of Art in New York from 1956 to 1958, and later at the Long Island Art League and the Jackson Heights Art Club. He established a private art studio on Long Island, which he ran until his death."

Art critic L. Natalevičienė states that the artist's "work, which oscillates between realism and post-impressionism, was influenced by Latvian painting and seventeenth-century Dutch landscape art. In the works of P. Puzinas, art critics see a refreshing technique of Renaissance painting – a hobby of laying layers of paint on a dark background. In his work, he relied on the landscape composition scheme typical of classical painting: a low horizon that allows him to focus on the changing sky and convey the natural movement of the air with restless strokes, elevating the unsophisticated image to the metaphor of the inner state. With the help of his favorite coloring of greenish and grayish tones, he vigorously covered the canvas with a brush and spatula, forming a painterly expressive rough surface. The artist was interested in expressionism and post-impressionism, but he was not impressed by Western philosophical concepts and mysticism. The painter, who grew up in a more earthly environment, felt the value of the concreteness of reality, sifting through modernist means that were acceptable only to him – synthesis and deformation of form, expressive and decorative manner of painting.

L. Natalevičienė emphasizes that "Classical modernist painting developed by the artist had considerable success in the twentieth century, which was saturated with avant-garde art directions and trends. P. Puzinas received recognition in Latvia (in 1933 he won the prize of the State Museum of Art for the painting "The Suburb of Jelgava"), in Lithuania (in 1942 – the first prize for "The Portrait of Darius and Girėnas" in the exhibition in Kaunas and the second prize in the New Homestead Competition for Landscape) and in the United States of America, where perhaps the most famous painting by Puzin "Madonna of the Twentieth Century" was awarded the first prize in 1951 at the 6th International Exhibition of the Madonna Festival in Los Angeles,  and in 1956 he won the Major%8 of the American Professional League of Artists in Chicago. It is symbolic that after the restoration of independence of the Baltic States, on the initiative of the artist's wife Austra Bošs, the paintings were divided between Lithuanian and Latvian museums – after all, the artist belonged to the culture of both countries. The last exhibition of Puzinas' works in Lithuania was held in 1998. Vilnius Picture Gallery on the occasion of the artist's 90th birthday.