Mikolajus Ciurlionis

(1875-1911)

(b Varena, Lithuania, 22 Sept 1875; d Pustelnik Minski, 10 April 1911).
 Lithuanian painter and composer. He studied music at the Warsaw Institute of Music and the Leipzig Conservatory and then took up painting at the Warsaw School of Fine Arts in 1905. In both his musical compositions and his paintings he drew on Lithuanian folklore, especially in his early paintings of scenes from fairy tales. Like many of his Symbolist contemporaries he also explored the origins of life and its mystical significance as expressed in Oriental thought, as in the series of 13 pictures called the Creation of the World (1904–6; Kaunas, Ciurlionis A. Mus.). But he used more abstract forms than any of his contemporaries in Russia.