After becoming rector of the Art Academy in 1922, the painter Vilhelms Purvītis (1872–1945) began spending his summers in Dubulti. The summer house rented by the Purvītis family on Goncharov Street (now Aspazija Street) stood next door to the residence Aspazija had purchased in 1933. Purvītis was not an ordinary holidaymaker from Riga who idled on the beach and enjoyed the resort’s social life. He worked every day, becoming part of Jūrmala’s summer landscape. The exhibition “The Poet of Colour. Vilhelms Purvītis—Aspazija’s Neighbour in Dubulti” offers an insight into Purvītis’s summers in Jūrmala, the sources of the artist’s inspiration in the famous Latvian resort town, and his relationship with his no less famous neighbour—the poet Aspazija.
The exhibition features original works created by Purvītis in Jūrmala, from the Latvian National Museum of Art and the Zuzāns Collection of the “Zuzeum” Art Centre. High-quality reproductions of paintings created in Jūrmala are being exhibited for the first time; until just a few years ago, their fate was unknown, or they could be viewed only in black-and-white photographs. The exhibition’s academic consultant, art historian Baiba Guste, notes that Purvītis reveals himself as emotionally joyful and enthralled under the influence of the resort’s liberating atmosphere, the sea, and the scorching air scented with pine trees: “The uniqueness of the exhibition lies also in offering a glimpse of Vilhelms Purvītis’s lesser-known style, when more expressive brushwork and vibrating polychromy emerge in paintings from the 1920s and 1930s. Summery brightness, joie de vivre, as well as the variegated shimmer of colours characteristic of the foreboding of storms, are reflected in several paintings.” The author of the exhibition’s artistic concept, artist Linda Jurķe, has highlighted the atmosphere of a summer plein air in the exhibition design: “To truly sense the ‘joyful’ Purvītis in Jūrmala, the space had to be infused with forms characteristic of the city, thereby transforming the exhibition hall into a bright sheet on which to highlight the colour ‘poems’ of the outstanding master.”
The exhibition “The Poet of Colour. Vilhelms Purvītis - Aspazija’s Neighbour in Dubulti” was created in cooperation with the Latvian National Museum of Art and the “Zuzeum” Art Centre, the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest, the Moderna Museet in Sweden, and the Museum of Art and Design in Benešov, Czechia. Works created by Vilhelms Purvītis in Jūrmala will be on view at Aspazija’s House until 9 November 2024.
