HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL RELATIONS IN ČIURLIONIS' VISUAL EXPRESSION. PARALLELS OF ESOTERICISM IN THE PARADIGM OF ČIURLIONIS

The article focuses on the not always clearly visible deep pattern of recognition and reconstruction of the regularities in the compositional structuring of Čiurlionis’ musical and pictorial expression and artistic material, which is evident in his mature paintings of the sonata period. Such an immanent approach to the sources that feed the specificity of this universal artist’s compositional thinking implies an important polemical theoretical discourse on the under- standing of the phenomenon of Čiurlionis’s oeuvre, which is directly related to the knowledge of the compositional structure of his sonata painting works. A more consistent exploration of the principles of compositional structuring of paintings from this period leads to two important hypotheses that emerge during the research:

(1) Čiurlionis’ artistic forms, symbols, metaphors, signs, horizontals, verticals, and other formal and meaningful “mechanisms” of structuring his works, i.e., the compositional principles of organizing his material, are essentially the same both in the artist’s musical and pictorial expression, and they are conditioned by the skills of his musical sensibility intensively cultivated from childhood.

(2) Čiurlionis’ deepest creative impulses are related both to theosophy and to the manifestations of the modern esotericism that spread at the beginning of the 20th century.

The present analysis highlights the coincidence of regularities in the creative process of musical and especially visual artworks, in particular when the patterns of forming artistic structures in Čiurlionis’s musical thinking and in the mature pictorial thinking of his sonata period are explored more consistently from the perspective of the psychology of art.