Nude woman

Vytautas Kasiulis (1918–1995) made his artistic debut during the Second World War. A solo exhibition of his work in 1943 at the Vytautas Magnus Culture Museum in Kaunas aroused great interest. One of the reasons for his success was his contemporaries’ hope that he would be able to lay the foundations for the long-awaited Lithuanian school of academic painting. In fact, for some time he persistently followed the road of retrospectivism. He studied the 17th-century artistic heritage carefully. One of the results of his efforts was his discovery of a way to depict a figure from several sides on a two-dimensional plane with the help of a mirror. He tried this method on himself first (in around 1943, he painted a self-portrait in front of a mirror; the work is now in the collection of the Lithuanian Theatre, Music and Cinema Museum), and then he applied it to others. When painting Nude woman, he painted a window that was reflected in the mirror, and the view through it. This detail deepens the illusory space of the picture, and introduces some life and some optimism into a static and gloomy scene.

Vytautas Kasiulis (1918–1995) made his artistic debut during the Second