Collection: Bronius Murinas

Bronius Murinas (1906–1986), born in Riga, was a Lithuanian painter and teacher who spent the second half of his life in Chicago. He studied painting at the Kaunas School of Art from 1923 to 1929 under Kazimieras Sklėrius, and furniture design at the École Boulle in Paris from 1932 to 1935. In the 1930s and early 1940s he taught at schools and teacher-training institutions in Kaunas, Klaipėda and Vilnius, including the Klaipėda and Vilnius Pedagogical Institutes and the Vilnius School of Fine Arts. He also wrote textbooks on drawing and composition in 1939–1940. In 1944 he left Lithuania for Germany, and in 1949 he settled in Chicago, where he lived until his death. He painted landscapes, portraits and still lifes. Until 1967 he worked mainly in watercolour, with light, transparent colour influenced by Post-Impressionism; his later compositions in acrylic and oil became more decorative, with saturated colour and expressionist forms. He held solo exhibitions in Klaipėda in 1936 and repeatedly in Chicago from 1957 onwards, as well as in other American cities, and posthumous exhibitions were held in Vilnius in 1990 and 2008. The watercolour “Abstract Still Life” (1962), offered by TUMO Gallery, belongs to his watercolour period in Chicago.