By Inna Rogatchi
LITVAK ARTISTS IN PARIS EXHIBITION IN VILNIUS
PART II. CELEBRATIONS & CHAGALL UNIVERSE
In a remarkable way, additionally to the feast of Chagall, this exhibition also created three very special celebrations of great artists, Arbit Blatas born Neemia Arbitblatas, Rafael Chwoles and Michel Kikoine. In all three cases, there are not a single or couple of works of these brilliant masters, whose all legacy is both large and important, that we can see as a part of a collective show, but there are very well thought of and sharply selected ( I can just imagine how difficult the process was) , presentations of oeuvres of these masters in its best.
To succeed to create three quite representative mini-exhibitions of such important masters, still having it in a perfectly harmonious accord with an entire exhibition in a whole, is a very serious achievement by the curator. My gratitude and congratulations to my friend and colleague Vilma Gradinskaite. This kind of work, this kind of approach requires not only a serious knowledge and a sharp curator’s eye. It requires a deep understanding, co-feeling and love.
Litvak artists, maybe as rarely as someone else in the history of art, apart from van Gogh, do deserve to be treated with love and understanding, understanding and love. Their dramatic lives were so challenged and so atypical from a regular life of artists who lived in their own countries or were free in their choices of everything, that the degree of overcoming spent by each of them for living and work does deserve a different approach and a different level of understanding, a different treatment towards each of them and at the same time, all of them together, from any other artist in modern history of art. In the case of the Litvak Artists in Paris exhibition in Vilnius they all, all 21 of them, have got it, gracefully.
Arbit Blatas who was born Neemia Arbitblatas in the beginning of the 20th century in Kaunas, and who had long and very productive artistic life, is presented at the exhibition in Vilnius by eight large enough oil paintings and four exquisite figurines from the collection of 20-strong outstanding sculpture portraits of his fellow artists from the Ecole de Paris which is now part of the collection of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art and which will make an honour to the most prestigious museums world-wide. Several years ago, Arbit Baltas’s family donated 300 of his works to the Lithuanian state, and now this very important collection is at home.