www.lituanus.org
Copyright © 1955 Lithuanian Students Association, Inc.
 
No..3-4 - July 1955
Editor of this issue: A. V. Dundzila
  

Literary Look

75th ANNIVERSARY OF PROF. ADOMAS VARNAS

During the month of March Chicagoans had an oppurtunity to get acquainted with Lithuania's famous artist, Prof. A. Varnas, who had his 75th Anniversary exhibition in Maria High School. The show included stamp designs, many landscapes done in oils, and a historical painting representing the coronation in 1253 of Lithuania's first king, Mindaugas. Today Varnas' paintings of his country's idyllic landscape expressed with lyricism and sentiment, are of great importance for all Lithuanians who share a nostalgic longing for their native land.

Adomas Varnas was born on January 2, 1879, in Joniškis, Lithuania. He studied painting in Petrograd, Russia, and Krakow, Poland, until 1906. At that time he went to Geneva to attend the Academy of Art, from which he graduated with a "hors concours" degree. During a visit to Sicily he planned his first one-man show. He has exhibited in Galizia, Poznane, and Zakopane, Poland.

Since 1908 Varnas has exhibited with other Lithuanian artists in Vilnius and Kaunas. In 1920 he became a member of the Lithuanian Arts Creators' Association and until 1922 served as its president. The anniversary exhibition of his twenty years of creative work was held in 1927 in the Fine Arts Salon, and in 1937 in Kaunas an Joniškis, the thirtieth anniversary exhibition.

Professor Varnas, who was the head of the painting class in the art school of Kaunas, has, in the past seventy-five years, done many portraits of famous politicians, artists, and poets.