Lietuvių dailininkai Freiburge ir Vakarų Europos meninė aplinka

Abstract

Having been forced in 1944 to leave their homeland, a group of Lithuanian visual artists established a School of Arts and Crafts (Ecole des Arts et Metiers) in Freiburg (1947–1950) that became an important cultural haven for displaced persons. Artists, teachers, and students there immersed themselves in current European culture, visiting museums and exhibitions. But how did that play itself out in their own work? Did it affect and change the artistic attitudes they had acquired in pre-war Lithuania at the Kaunas Art School? On the basis of facts about post-war European cultural life as revealed in archival and epistolary sources, this article attempts both to determine the ways these refugee artists related to the Western European culture that surrounded them and to reveal their thoughts on the issue, so vitally important to emigres, of preserving national identity while adjusting to life in a foreign country. Great attention is paid to the school’s founder Vytautas K. Jonynas (1907–1997) whose personality, active creativity, and organizational decisions had decisive significance for the development of Lithuanian art in emigration. An analysis of the activities of the School of Arts and Crafts in Freiburg warrants the conclusion that this school was a local and closed community of Eastern Europeans in the French occupation zone. Artistically and socially it sought not so much to become part of Western European culture as to distinguish itself ethnically by representing Lithuanian national and artistic values. Though its artists were interested in Western culture, they mostly did not seek vital contact with it. The need to maintain Lithuanian national and community identity willy-nilly became a strategy of separation. The loyalty to classical traditions that dominated the school gradually discouraged creativity.[...]