The National Museum of Western Art

Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911) is one of Lithuania’s most celebrated cultural figures, a visionary who fused painting and music into a singular artistic language. Trained as a composer before turning to visual art in the early 1900s, Čiurlionis created more than 300 works in just six years, drawing on Art Nouveau, Symbolism and Japonisme while grounding his imagery in Lithuanian identity under Russian imperial rule. His dreamlike canvases, rich in myth and cosmology, reveal a rare talent whose life was tragically cut short at the age of 35. The National Museum of Western Art marks the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth with ‘The Inner Constellation’, running from March 28 to June 14. Presented in collaboration with the National M. K. Čiurlionis Art Museum in Kaunas, the exhibition will feature around 80 major works, including the Japanese debut of The Altar (1909) and the monumental masterpiece Rex (1909), the artist’s largest and most enigmatic painting. Organised into five thematic chapters, the retrospective also highlights Čiurlionis’s innovations in integrating musical structures into visual art, presenting sonata-inspired series, handwritten scores, and his own compositions playing in the galleries. Here, audiences can fully immerse themselves in Čiurlionis’s cosmic vision of the human spirit and the universe.