Joy of Living

In an age that tends increasingly toward gloom, horror and mathematical coldness in art, the painter who makes a critical success with warm and happy pictures is an exception. Such an artist is Vytautas Kasiulis, 36, a refugee from Lithuania, whose one-man show in Paris last week was a solid hit with critics and buyers alike.

Collectively titled Joy of Living, Kasiulis' 27 canvases are all nostalgic, tender scenes with an old-fashioned sentiment about them reminiscent of the designs in petit-point footstool covers. Harmony shows two blonde maidens sitting together on a fringed sofa, both playing the same guitar. Prelude is an idyllic rural scene, with meadows, trees and a clear blue pond; a graceful boy and girl are about to eat a picnic lunch. In The Portrait, Kasiulis mildly lampoons his own profession he shows a grave, bearded artist painting a mirror-like portrait of a model gaily dressed in red and green. All of Kasiulis' paintings are done in a technique that uses a jet-black-underpainted background to accentuate the lightness of the colors. And all his pictures, with the exception of six gay still lifes of flowers and fruit, deal with his favorite subject matter: slightly ridiculous but lovable lower-middle-class people, treated by the artist with gentle irony.

Painter Kasiulis is as gentle and unpretentious as the characters of his paintings --and as much a victim of hard knocks as they. Before 1943 he taught drawing at the Fine Arts School in Kaunas, the capital of his native Lithuania. Then the Nazis shipped him off as a slave laborer to an East Prussian farm. There Kasiulis milked cows and painted portraits of local German bigwigs, a service for which he was rewarded with extra food rations. After the war, helped by sympathetic Allied officers, he made his way to Paris, where he got a job as a nightwatchman. By night he patrolled a radio shop with a revolver; by day he visited the galleries, marveled at the works of the French impressionists.

Kasiulis had his first one-man show in 1949, promptly sold all 23 paintings in the exhibit. Last fall 50 portfolios of his lithographs quickly sold out, and in the last six months, Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art has bought three of his paintings. The pictures in last week's show were also selling well, at around $200 each, and the critics enthusiastically hailed Kasiulis as an oasis of joy in a desert of gloom and pessimism.

Kasiulis himself thinks that it is high time both people and painters gave more attention to the joys of living. Says he: "People are worrying too much. After all, what do we really need? A room, a bed and one square meal a day. There is still plenty of sunshine around."

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