KunstenaarLithuanian-French
Vytautas Kasiulis
1 actieve items
Vytautas Kasiulis arrived in Paris in 1948 with little more than his training and a determination to paint, and within two years had already attracted the attention of galleries and museum curators. A 1950 exhibition hosted by the art expert Christian-Gilbert Stiébel drew critical acclaim and institutional notice, launching a Parisian career that would span more than four decades and produce a body of work estimated at over 1,500 oil paintings, 950 pastels, 200 gouaches, and around 50 lithographs.
Born on 23 April 1918 in Simnas, a small town in southern Lithuania, Kasiulis studied at the Kaunas Art School before moving to the Vilnius Academy of Art. He taught drawing in Kaunas until 1943 and showed in group exhibitions beginning in 1942, with a solo show at the Vytautas Magnus Museum of Culture in 1943. The following year he left for Germany, where he taught at the Fine Arts School in Freiburg im Breisgau and exhibited in Kiel, Hamburg, and elsewhere. The Soviet annexation of Lithuania made return impossible, and Paris became his permanent home.
His work aligns with the School of Paris - figurative, warmly colored, attentive to the pleasures of light and interior space. Figures in ateliers, street scenes, still lives, and landscapes make up the core of the output, painted with a fluid confidence that sits between intimism and mild expressionism. He also worked as a book illustrator, extending his graphic sensibility beyond the studio. From 1954 onward he exhibited internationally in Berlin, Copenhagen, Geneva, Stockholm, Cleveland, New York, and Toronto, and in 1955 his work was included in a Galliera Museum exhibition of one hundred of the most prominent Parisian artists.
Kasiulis eventually purchased his own gallery in central Paris, a rare position of self-sufficiency for an exile artist. His work entered museums in Paris and New York, and collections in France, the United States, Canada, Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, Argentina, Australia, and Israel. After his death in Paris on 12 March 1995, his legacy was honored in Vilnius with the opening of the Vytautas Kasiulis Art Museum in 2013, which holds a permanent collection of donated works.
On the Nordic auction market Kasiulis appears across a range of Swedish houses - RA Auktionsverket Norrköping, Helsingborgs Auktionskammare, Stockholms Auktionsverk, and Skånes Auktionsverk among them. The 35 works in the Auctionist database span paintings, pastels, and prints. The top result is "Figurer framför spegel" in gouache at 36,000 SEK, followed by "Konstnären - i ateljén" at 21,199 SEK. Lithographs trade at more accessible levels, typically in the 2,000-4,000 SEK range.