In this article I discuss how post-war refugee artists looked at the American artistic context and the fostering of one’s own national art during the second half of the 20th century. On the basis of archival material and published texts I seek to reveal how Lithuanian émigrés evaluated works and processes of art in a cultural environment that was new to them. Lithuanian creators of art had been formed in a European artistic environment. Having settled in Western countries after World War II, they were not always able to understand the processes of American avant-garde art. The relation of newly-arrived Lithuanian artists to the cultural environment they weren’t used to was often complicated. This was magnified by the contrast between the national community’s desire to have a national art and the activities of American museums and galleries oriented toward the international scene and the market.

Today Lithuanians are a diaspora people dispersed throughout the world. Among them, some are important to world cultural history; this article is about two of them. They were World War II refugees and currently are perhaps the most famous Lithuanian artists alive: Jonas Mekas (b. 1922) and Aleksandra Kasuba (Kašuba, Kašubienė; b. 1923). Their fates, like those of many postwar emigrants, were affected by the trauma of war and the problem of being a refugee, a “displaced person”. But in contrast to some other Lithuanian artists to whom such an existence in exile meant being creatively unproductive, Jonas Mekas and Aleksandra Kasuba found an environment conducive to their creativity in both the European DP camps and in the United States to which they emigrated. Both were able to participate in the international world of art and to leave their mark on 20th century art history. Jonas Mekas and Aleksandra Kasuba belong to the same generation of Lithuanian emigrants. Forced to leave their homeland early in their lives and not yet having had time in Lithuania to fully acquire and indentify with the national artistic canon, they created unique works in the West– creations born of artistic curiosity, a spirit of protest against the world’s imperfection, and the need to find a way of living in it. It is the purpose of this paper to explore both how war and the postwar condition influenced the lives of these young and gifted creators as well as what factors might have been responsible for the high quality of their artistic achievements. These factors are perhaps not so much the external conditions they faced as those internal, psychosocial constraints for an artist’s success that lie in his or her nature and individual qualities. [...]