Exhibition "Petras Kalpokas (1880-1945) and the Environment", 20 June 2020 – 14 November 2020

Exhibition "Petras Kalpokas (1880-1945) and the Environment", 20 June 2020 – 14 November 2020, at the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art (V. Putvinskio St. 55, Kaunas).

From 20 June, the exhibition "Petras Kalpokas (1880–1945) and the Environment" will open at the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art (V. Putvinskio St. 55, Kaunas).

Petras Kalpokas (1880–1945) was one of the most famous and productive Lithuanian painters, scenography and fresco creators of the first half of the 20th century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he became famous not only in Lithuania but also in Germany, is well-known in Latvia, a professor at the Kaunas Art School, and the head of a painting studio.

During the First World War, P. Kalpokas lost all his works – 120 paintings, which were transported from his personal exhibition in Mintauja to his exhibition in Berlin. Only 16 of them were bought by the Vytautas Magnus Museum of Culture in 1937 from the private German collector H. Lüder-Lühr. In this exposition, viewers will see for the first time the entirety of P. Kalpokas' paintings, supplemented by an even larger part of lost creation, which was returned to Lithuania by private individuals from various sources, often from owners living abroad. For the first time, the exhibition will allow you to get acquainted with the most significant early period of P. Kalpokas' work in more detail, to see the paintings that brought him fame abroad, and to see the extraordinary talents of the painter in his youth.

The exhibition presents the most famous works of P. Kalpokas of all periods, all genres of the artist's painting: landscapes of Lithuania, Italy and Switzerland, improvised portraits of the people closest to him – his wife Olga Dubeneckienė-Kalpokienė, his wife's sister T. Švedaitė, the artist Ignas Šlapelis, the ballet artist Marija Juozapaitytė-Kelbauskienė, the portrait of his mother, several self-portraits that give meaning to the most important stages of the author's life, as well as historical portraits of the dukes of Lithuania, symbolic compositions and images from the life of fishermen, still lifes are extremely rare in the artist's work, because he was not interested in inanimate nature and other objects created by civilization. He never painted images of buildings and cities. As an artist of a sensitive, lyrical and delicate nature, P. Kalpokas was most fond of landscape and adored natural nature. His paintings varied depending on the environment that surrounded him and gave him a creative impulse. Living in Lithuania brought back the beloved native nature, which she longed for abroad. Here, however, he lost the passion for modernity that had raised his creative spirit in the Munich environment.

This is the second exhibition of paintings by Petras Kalpokas, organized after the artist's death. The first one took place in 1980 in Vilnius, at the Lithuanian Art Museum. In recent years, the artist's works have been shown in several significant exhibitions. One of them is the exhibition "Before Dawn" at the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art (2019). The first attempt to place P. Kalpokas in the context of European art in the international exhibition dedicated to the European landscape (2009) was particularly important. Recently, three of the artist's works were exhibited in Paris, in an exhibition of Baltic symbolism, which was transferred to the Estonian Art Museum in Tallinn, and this summer will come to Vilnius, to the National Gallery of Art.

P. Kalpokas was born in 1880. He died in 1945 in Kaunas. The artist actively participated in all the first exhibitions of Lithuanian artists, and his artistic abilities were noticed early on by Latvian artists Jānis Valteris and Vilhemas Purvītis. The bright talent of P. Kalpokas as a painter matured in the spiritual environment of Munich, which helped to find a distinctive modern artistic expression. Here he received greater creative recognition, was a member of the Sezession and participated in Kunstverein exhibitions. He was also respected in Riga as an active participant in the exhibitions of the Baltic Artists' Union (1905, 1910, 1911, 1913, 1918).

The works were loaned to the exhibition by: Lithuanian National Museum of Art, Latvian National Museum of Art, National Museum of Lithuania, Vytautas the Great War Museum, Kaunas City Museum, Kaunas Archdiocese Museum, Šiauliai "Aušra" Museum, Lithuanian Art Knowledge Centre "Tartle", ARS VIA auction, Kaunas St. The Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary (Vytautas the Great), the Lithuanian Literature and Art Archive, Dr. Jaunius Gumbis, Arijus Ivaškevičius, Andrius Jankauskas, and other private collectors.

Curator of the exhibition dr. Nijolė Tumėnienė