Imagination from Memory: On a Few Ghosts of Čiurlionis

While investigating objectively unverifiable hypotheses, researchers are often drawn to the relationship between documenting reality and the imagination. For example, since the 19th century, analysis of prehistoric catastrophes has focused on ever-newer archaeological, geological, and paleontological discoveries. These findings have been linked to eschatological biblical imagery, mythological plots, or narratives imbued with archetypal symbols of cataclysm.

This presentation discusses in more detail M. K. Čiurlionis’s six-painting cycle The Storm (1904), which was lost and later reconstructed only from photographic negatives and the recollections of his contemporaries. Like some other artists who conveyed apocalyptic visions in their work, this Lithuanian visionary used abstract means to depict a Great Flood, an event for which he could have had no visual analogies in his own time. The existential terror that emerges from the work, a fear driven by the threat of nearly total destruction of life — is here proposed to be reconsidered through the medium of the dream.

Skaidra Trilupaitytė: Art Historian, Cultural Policy Researcher, Senior Researcher at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute, Lecturer at Vilnius Academy of Arts.