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Nude woman with a cigarette

Author: Ada Peldavičiūtė–Montvydienė (1911–1967)
Created:1934
Material:canvas
Technique:oil
Dimensions:82 × 55 cm
Signature:

top left: Ada.

Only a small number of early works by Ada Peldavičiūtė-Montvydienė (19111967), who came from the Ketūnai estate near Kuršėnai, have survived in Lithuania. A portrait by her of a female nude with a cigarette is visually astounding. The elegance of its elongated forms, and the provocative nudity and the cigarette in the hand, which are uncharacteristic of Lithuanian painting, stand out in the context of Kaunas art of the period. The work bears clear similarities with the Art Deco paintings by the famous American of Polish origin Tamara de Lempicka.

An alumnus of Kaunas Art School and Florence Academy of Art, Peldavičiūtė- Montvydienė fled to Austria in 1944 with her husband Antanas Montvydas, who had studied art in Tallinn, and settled in New York in 1949. Although she did not stop working in exile, she did not take part in exhibitions of work by the Lithuanian community. Only in 1981 was her first retrospective held in New York and Toronto, 14 years after her death. In 2013, the USA-based Lithuanian Fund gave the Lithuanian National Art Museum 26 works by Peldavičiūtė-Montvydienė, which, along with Nude woman with a cigarette, were displayed in the exhibition ‘The Homecoming of Ada’s Work’ in 2015 in the Radvila Palace Museum.

Text authors Dovilė Barcytė and Ieva Burbaitė

If you are interested in this image, find Aušra Sluckaitė-Jurašienė’s book Egziliantės užrašai (An Expatriate’s Notes, 2008) with the reproduction of this painting by Ada Peldavičiūtė-Montvydienė (19111967) on the cover. Read the essay ‘Ados spintelė’ (Ada’s Cupboard), and you will learn about the picture and the painter. When this graduate of Kaunas School of Art and Florence Art Academy was leaving Lithuania in 1944, she left behind several portraits (of Elena Žalinkevičaitė-Petrauskienė, Antanas Montvydas and Telesforas Valius) which stood out by their elongated and elegant shapes of human figures, which are unusual in Lithuanian painting. The works verge on sentimentality, but are prevented from slipping over the edge by the energetic charge expressed by the style and the objects portrayed, thanks to the strong spirit of both the model and the painter. The pictures recall Italian (Novecento Italiano) and German (Neue Sachlichkeit) versions of interwar Neo-Classicism. Although the artist studied in Italy, the association with the latter movement was stronger, the more so as Peldavičiūtė was undoubtedly a city dweller, and liked to portray her models not in nature, but in small, gloomy spaces.

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Source: Law firm Valiunas Ellex art album MORE THAN JUST BEAUTY (2012). Compiler and author Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, KAUNAS–VILNIUS / 1918–1945 (2021). Compilers and text authors Dovilė Barcytė and Ieva Burbaitė
Expositions: “More Than Just Beauty: The Image of Woman in the LAWIN collection”, 12 October – 11 November 2012, National Gallery of Art, Vilnius; "Returned works of Ada", 3 July– 1 September 2013, Museum of the Radvilas Palace, Vilnius;  “Personal. Lithuanian Women's Art 1918-1940”, 14 April – 04 June  2017, National Gallery of Art, Vilnius (curator – Ieva Burbaitė); "1918-1945 / Kaunas-Vilnius", 27 August 2020 – 21 August 2021, Lithuanian Art Centre TARTLE (Užupio St. 40, Vilnius). Curators Dovilė Barcytė and Ieva Burbaitė.