Jonas Švažas (1925–1976) was a Lithuanian painter who taught at the Lithuanian Art Institute, initiated the Vilnius Painting Triennial and received the Lithuanian SSR State Prize in 1975. From the 1960s he focused on landscape, combining Fauvist and Expressionist intensity of colour with abstracted form and bold colour planes. Regarded as a pioneer of the industrial landscape in Lithuanian painting, he depicted Vilnius Old Town in vivid hues in his late work.
Jonas Švažas (1925–1976) was a Lithuanian painter, born in Urvikiai in the Mažeikiai district. As a gymnasium pupil he attended the M. K. Čiurlionis art circle led by the watercolourist Česlovas Kontrimas, and in 1953 he graduated from the Lithuanian Art Institute in Vilnius. He taught painting at the Institute until his death, becoming an associate professor in 1965. Švažas chaired the painting section of the Lithuanian Artists’ Union and initiated the Vilnius Painting Triennial, first held in 1969. He began with thematic compositions and portraits, but from the 1960s turned away from official artistic hierarchies and devoted himself mainly to landscape. His landscapes combine a Fauvist and Expressionist intensity of colour with abstraction of form and bold planes of colour; he is regarded as a pioneer of the industrial landscape in Lithuanian painting, and in his later work he depicted Vilnius Old Town in vivid, contrasting colours. He travelled to France, Yugoslavia, India, Cuba, Morocco and Britain, and exhibited in Russia, France, the United States and Japan. In 1975 he received the Lithuanian SSR State Prize, and his works are held in the Lithuanian National Museum of Art and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. He died in Vilnius in 1976. The pastel “Street near St. Michael’s Church” (1975), from the cycle “Vilnius Courtyards”, offered by TUMO Gallery, belongs to his late series devoted to the Old Town of Vilnius.
