A PATCH OF HOMELAND IN A STRANGE LAND
This landscape, painted impulsively, as if in a single breath, is a late-period work by Viktoras Vizgirdas, demonstrating the changes that took place in the artist's work during the last decades of his life. Having demonstrated his loyalty to traditional landscape painting throughout his career, towards the end of his life Vizgirda consistently shook off the realism of nature, opted for acrylic paint, flattened space, and transformed his favourite trees and foliage motifs into geometric shapes. The painting "On the Edge of Town" is characterised by the spontaneous force of emotions, nervous intersections of perpendicular lines and horizontal areas, and the restless rhythm of freely arranged trees. The monumental ambition of the work is reinforced by an almost poster-like treatment of form. The painting appears rather schematic, tending towards abstraction, but it does not lack the sensuality and inner tension characteristic of the artist. This expressive and seemingly detached manner of painting is even more intriguing. Yesterday's colourfulness and the expressive rhythm of lush vegetation and tree branches, which had previously distinguished Vizgirdas from other Lithuanian artists, give way to a simplified image, and the colouring, which is bursting with colour, is reduced to planes of a few shades of greenish-blue, brown, and greyish greys. The work is valuable for its artistic merits, but at the same time it marks a shift in Vizgirdas's work towards a greater generalization of form and thought, a shift that was pushed forward by the American art scene. However, the foreign nature, which had surrounded the artist even longer than the Lithuanian one, had long since become his own, and was painted as if it were a patch of his native land.
After the Second World War, Lithuanian artists tried to establish themselves in other countries, and the dynamic artistic processes taking place there adjusted their work. The post-impressionist worldview that had become a tradition between the wars, combining modernity with realism, began to be questioned by Lithuanians. Not so for Vizgirdas, who was little influenced by the changing art movements in his new homeland. He looked to the past for a point of reference and saw American nature through the eyes of a boy from Višakio Ruda. However, Vizgirdas's style evolved towards spontaneity and generalisation of form, but he did not lose his emotional connection with nature, seeing in it a piece of the Lithuania he left behind. The landscape "On the Edge of Town" is valuable for its artistic merits and as a reflection of Vizgirdas's last stage of his creative path.
Dr. Lijana Natalevičienė
