From Sketch to Painting: 100 Years of Jonas Švažas
The exhibition dedicated to the centenary of painter Jonas Švažas (1925–1976), which opened to visitors on July 25, is spread across multiple venues — the Baroti Gallery and the exhibition halls of the Klaipėda Culture Communication Center. In doing so, the curators aimed to present not only the representative and more widely recognized side of Švažas’ work, already familiar to art lovers, but also to reveal more intimate traces of his artistic activity and its connection to his personal life. This intention is reflected in the exhibition title — From Sketch to Painting — which points to the dynamics of the artist’s creative process, mirrored in the viewers’ physical movement through the exhibition spaces: from drawings and photographs shown at the Baroti, including Meadow, created during his student years, to his paintings displayed at the KCCC, among them Tree Trunks, his last completed work.
Jonas Švažas was born on August 5, 1925, in the village of Urvikiai in the Mažeikiai district. His inclination towards art emerged during his school years. While attending Mažeikiai Secondary School, he participated in the art club led by Česlovas Kontrimas — a watercolorist and printmaker trained at the Kaunas Art School. In 1946, Švažas enrolled at the State Art Institute (now the Vilnius Academy of Arts), where, following his graduation in 1953, he taught painting until 1976. In 1965, he was granted the title of Associate Professor, and a decade later, he was honored as a Meritorious Artist and awarded the Lithuanian SSR State Prize. From the mid-1950s, Švažas began participating in various exhibitions. In 1957, he became a member of the Lithuanian Artists’ Association; he served as head of its Painting Section from 1959 to 1969 and again from 1973 to 1974. From 1963 to 1968, he was a member of the board of the USSR Artists’ Association.
Over the course of two decades of creative work, Švažas painted around 600 paintings and left behind more than 300 pastels and drawings. When going for walks, the artist would often carry drawing materials with him — to sketch scenes that caught his eye. Although Švažas frequently worked in the open air, it was also common for him to finish the drawings he brought back from his walks using pastel, and to later paint from them in his studio. Even though the pastels and drawings served a preparatory function, they stand as independent works of art, reflecting Švažas’ stylistic approach and offering significant insight into his priorities regarding compositional structure.
Among Švažas’ favored drawing motifs were Vilnius courtyards and alleys, as well as trees. The poet Justinas Marcinkevičius regarded the recurring image of the tree as an emblem of Švažas’ art and recognized the multilayered meaning it carried: “In Švažas’ tree, there is the artist himself, with all his human experience. I would go even further — with the painful experience of the entire nation. One might say it was history that guided the artist’s hand.” In honor of her husband’s anniversary and his distinctive fondness for painting trees, Marija Švažienė wove a tapestry last winter titled Trees in Blossom. Dedicated to the 100th Anniversary of Jonas Švažas. Displayed for the first time in this exhibition, the tapestry reveals both the artist’s skill and the deep, enduring bond between the two. This connection is also reflected in Double Portrait, painted by Švažas in 1962, which depicts the couple together.
During the 1960s and 70s, the first signs of modernity began to emerge across Lithuania’s artistic landscape, and the radicalism of Švažas’ work — breaking away from naturalistic and literal depictions of socially charged reality, and moving toward metaphor and expression through form — became a powerful stimulus for like-minded painters. The Švažas family home became a gathering place for progressive artists such as Silvestras Džiaukštas, Vincas Kisarauskas, Jonas Čeponis, Leonas Surgailis, Stasys Jusionis, and others, where heated discussions took place — once described by Kisarauskas as “battles of the colorist movement.” Švažas repeatedly voiced his views on painting and the ideological demands of the Soviet era, encouraging his peers to resist.
The painter himself was well acquainted with global developments in modern art — not only through foreign publications that reached Lithuania by various means at the time, but also through travel. As early as the mid-1960s, he visited France, Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, and India, and later traveled to Cuba, Morocco, and the United Kingdom. It is therefore not surprising that Švažas consistently drew on modernist principles, which emphasized originality in visual expression. After the 1965 Exhibition of Baltic Painting in Moscow, Švažas initiated the Vilnius Painting Triennials, which brought together artists from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and positioned Vilnius as the center of Baltic painting.
Although the artist lived and worked in Vilnius, he never limited himself to its cityscapes. With a few exceptions, there were no true marine painters in Lithuania — which made Švažas’ maritime scenes, with their drifting sailboats, ship festivals, and industrial port motifs, one of the most significant innovations of his time. In his work, water is not directly or realistically “portrayed.” Though it retains reflective qualities, water functions primarily as a chromatic and structural element within the painting’s plastic composition — a conditional color, a rhythm of reflections interacting with sails, masts, crane frameworks, bridge supports, and other elements of the urban or natural landscape. Bright, intense colors that suggest emotion, combined with clear, concise forms, create an impression that is at once monumental and uplifting.
Not only the works featuring water motifs, but also Švažas’ other paintings depicting urban structures, are characterized by a harmonious integration of plastic elements. Vivid, contrasting colors are often framed by black contour lines that temper their emotional intensity. This creates an illusion of luminosity reminiscent of stained glass, where emotionally radiant color is fused with the graphic clarity and rationality of line. This synthesis of emotional fluidity and structural precision can generate not only a sense of elation, but also tension — even drama or unease.
Like any artist, Švažas conveyed the world he saw and felt around him — a world that, in his final years, took on a distinctive boldness and urgency, expressed through seemingly chaotic patches of paint, fractured lines, and a coarse brushstroke texture. Therefore, Švažas’ body of work can be viewed as a deeply personal visual diary of his perception of reality. At the same time, it reflects the broader artistic context of the era, in which resistance to the often hostile norms of the ideological system demanded great determination and courage from the artist.
As the literary and art critic Irena Kostkevičiūtė has observed, through both his creative and public activity, Švažas legitimized the aesthetics of artistic transformation as a foundation of Lithuanian artistic thought. It is this foundation — the one that inspired the ongoing renewal of Lithuanian painting and continues to shape today’s visual culture — that visitors are invited to encounter and contemplate.
Dr. Dalia Karatajienė