Landscape with a stork
Author: Balzukevičius Juozapas, 1867 - 1915
Created: 1894.
Material / technique: oil on wood.
Dimensions: 25,5 × 35,5 cm
Signature: Balzukiewicz / 1894.
A WORK THAT HAS OUTLIVED ITS TIME
An extremely rare work by Józef Balzukiewicz - a summer landscape painted on a palette. A member of the famous Balzukiewicz dynasty of artists from Vilnius, who established himself in the history of Lithuanian art with such unsurpassed chrestomatic works as Through the Rye Field (1875), chose an unexpected and outdated solution, combining design with art: he painted a personal painting tool.
What prompted the artist to undertake such an endeavour? Perhaps he was inspired by the challenges of his new life to return to the object environment and to the late 19th century's nascent design? Or did he think to poke fun at the unconventional basis of painting? After all, he was young and had just begun his professional career as an artist (he graduated from the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg in 1893). It is very likely that Balzukevičius may have been inspired by the oval format, which was common in 19th-century art, and which was chosen by artists who painted realistic landscapes and still lifes. It is clear that we have encountered an unconventional approach and a special work whose value is not only in the painted landscape, but in all the components of the artefact - the object and the image.
Even today, Balzukevičius's choice to paint an everyday painter's tool would seem very contemporary. The intimate and unusual format of the work is matched by a witty motif of the Lithuanian landscape - a stork wading through a pond overgrown with meldew. This view reveals Balzukevičius' sympathies for national Romanticism, which celebrated the beauty of the country's nature and absorbed the advanced discoveries of 19th-century painting - a realistic manner based on studies of nature, against outdated academicism, the idealisation of reality, and hierarchy of genres and aesthetic values. The moody landscape is valuable for its rarity, original conception, informal content and painterly characteristics: lively and masterfully controlled fine brushstrokes, highlighting the realism and texture of the environment (land, sky, water plants, meadow flowers). The landscape is characterised by plein-air features, emphasised spatial plans and distances shrouded in mist on the horizon. As a true realist, the artist has turned to the everyday life, he is alien to everything that is artificial, contradictory to reality, especially the symmetry that does not exist in nature. He separates the planes of the sky and the earth, dividing the composition in half, but strives for asymmetry, capturing the taller bush on the left, using painterly means to nuance the volume and distribution of motifs in space.
"Landscape with a Stork adds to Balzukevičius's creative biography the hitherto undiscovered talents and timeless ideas of this artist (Dr. Lijana Natalevičienė).