Dailininkės Černės Percikovičiūtės asmuo ir kūryba

Abstract

Černė Percikovičiūtė‘s (1911–1941/2) hundred year anniversary prompted this research into the mysterious and tragic artist figure of the interwar period. There are only five extant works by the artist available to public, her hand-written autobiography, and the pictures of eleven of her lost works. Nevertheless, new data about her birth date and family have been recently found. Born into a well-to-do Jewish family, she seems to have graduated from a Jewish gymnasium, later studied at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, and at the same time attended and graduated from a two-year private studio of painter Justinas Vienožinskis. The teacher’s feedback shows that she was a talented and prospective student. Supported by her family and probably working at her parents‘ shop, she could freely pursue her artistic career. Characteristically to the Jewish people of the period in Lithuania, she kept some distance from the usual social life, but participated intensely in the exhibitions in Kaunas and beyond Lithuania. In ten years of her career, she took part in 18 exhibitions; with the 1936 Lithuanian Art Exhibition her works reached Chicago. Yet the approaching WWII made her situation dangerous and precarious: she was Jewish, unmarried, intellectual and artist; her both parents had already died at that time. In July 1941, she was impounded in the Kovno (Kaunas) Ghetto: there is nothing more known of her life just like of the most of the 30 thousand Jewish people massacred there either in 1941 or in 1942. She died at the age of 30, on an unknown day. Her art can be discussed on the basis of a few extant works and press responses of the period. It is poised on the boundary of careless dilettantism and creative freedom, quite distant from the material reality. In her art, the emotional and the intuitive is related not to the logic and structure, but to the spiritual and the mystical. It was a sufficiently rare approach in the Lithuanian art of the time, a truly “Jewish dimension.” Her paintings are dominated by close-ups, indicating the artist’s intent to take a really close look at the world. Bodies and objects in her paintings seem to be poised without real volume or weight and connected through an implicit reference to something shared by them. The characters depicted are most often in reverie, their gaze diverted from the viewer. They seem to recede to some more remote worlds or attempting to connect with a part of their own that has been sent away or departed somewhere a while ago. The tendency of the duo compositions and reiterations may be either the embodiment of alter ego, or an attempt to establish a dialogue. Sadly enough, her Self-Portrait with the Last Spring Flowers is a tragic metaphor for the artist’s life nipped in its spring bud.