Circus Rehearsal (plafond)

Stasys Ušinskas (1905–1974) must have begun designing the plafond Circus rehearsal in the late 1930s when he lived and worked in New York, at approximately the same time that he was painting the decorative composition Music (1938) for a Broadway theatre. Some of the characters in the preliminary drawings that were made for it were transferred to the new plafond. Both Music and Circusrehearsal are important examples of Art Deco, proving that Ušinskas was familiar with both modern art and the Classical heritage, or more precisely, with illusionary painting of 17th-century Italian Baroque. The plafond Circus rehearsal is sometimes dated to 1945, due to its stylistic association with the composition A Midsummer night’s dream (1946), but the artist probably finished the work before 1940, and during and after the war he altered separate parts of it. Text author Giedrė Jankevičiūtė.