Students of the pre-war Kaunas School of Art and artists who had begun their careers in an independent Lithuania, including Vytautas Jurkūnas, Algimantas Kučas, Jonas Kuzminskis, and Domicelė Tarabildienė, continued their work in graphic design under the Soviet regime. After the war, they pursued the development of trends begun in the 1930s: neoclassicism, critical realism, and expressionism rooted in folklore traditions. As ideological oversight over art increased at the end of the 1940s and at the start of the 1950s, they began creating more realistic, meticulous dry drawing engravings, but here also the illustrations by Jurkūnas for a publication of Donelaitis’ major work Metai (The Seasons) in 1956, for example, differed little from a pre-war edition by Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas (published in 1940).

 

An exhibition of Baltic graphic artwork and an accompanying conference on art theory organized in Vilnius in 1956 as part of the Soviet Union-wide preparations for the First USSR Artists’ Congress revealed that the uniqueness of the Lithuanian national graphic art style was defined by the use of crude and rudimentary form. The end of the 1950s saw a return of various interpretations of folk art. The folklorist graphic art movement was noted for the use of roughly cut wood or linoleum carvings featuring ornamentation found in traditional rural works of art and artisan engravings approximating a primitivist sketching style.

 

Creating book illustrations based on imagery motifs, ornamentation and passages from texts, graphic artists referenced the artistic principles of book illustration that took hold in Lithuania in the 1930s, whose origins, passed on through folk art carvings, reach back to the roots of xylography in 15th century Germany. Works by Žemaitė, Petras Cvirka and Vincas Krėvė accompanied by Soviet-era illustrations fostered a critical and rather disdainful view of that cradle of folk art, the traditional village, along with its way of life and customs. Fine examples of this include Brička by Jonas Krikščiukaitis-Aišbė, with illustrations created between 1938 and 1943 by Algimantas Kučas, and Kazys Boruta’s Baltaragio malūnas (Whitehorn’s Windmill), illustrated by Jonas Kuzminskis. Illustrations by Kučas and Jurkūnas featured scenes from the routine of everyday life, peopled by clumsy, doltish characters, expressive figure drawings reminiscent of caricature, crude proportions, and the depiction of domestic anachronisms that portrayed village life as dense and backward.

 

Prints of that era differed from book illustrations only in that they were based not on the work of a specific author, but on folklore, and instead of addressing the gritty prose of village life they conveyed the pathos of struggle or lyrical longing found in songs. Jonas Kuzminskis, chairman of the Soviet Lithuanian Artists’ Union from 1958 to 1982 and head of the Graphic Art Department of the Soviet Lithuanian State Art Institute (1948–1968), engraved 14 xylographs based on Lithuanian folk songs between 1960 and 1978, reworking some of them to embrace revolutionary themes. Kuzminskis, Jurkūnas and Domicelė Tarabildienė applied a socialist realist approach to the enduring, symmetrical composition style of symbolic figures found in sacred paintings crafted by village artisans and other “national” forms of expression to portray issues relevant to Soviet society of that era, crafting naive allegorical narratives, usually on the theme of world peace.

 

A new generation of graphic artists coming of age at the end of 1950s (many of them students of Kuzminskis, Kučas and Jurkūnas), including Albina Makūnaitė, Algirdas Steponavičius, Vytautas Valius, Aspazija Surgailienė, Birutė Žilytė, Sigutė Valiuvienė and Aldona Skirutytė, created a multitude of prints employing motifs from folk songs, stories and literary works. Often, they inserted lines of text into their imagery. Desiring to keep pace with colorism’s influence on painting, they applied gouache to give bright coloring to their wood and linoleum cliché plates. Modernist, expressive and decorative interpretations of folk art that revealed one specific element of a given folk engraving, carving, weaving or wooden chest ornamentation formed the foundation for their own individual style of expression. A characteristic common to graphic artwork of the folklorist movement was the use of ornamental fields comprised of parallel stroke marks and the use of dash strokes seen in the silhouetted figures of folk carvings, used to considerable fluid and plastic effect.

 

Other trends in graphic art in the 1960s, while not directly associated with folklore, were also rooted in elements of the Lithuanian national cultural heritage. The spread of modernism was inextricably linked to European cultural traditions, just as the portrayal of the present day was rooted in historical methods of expression. The village had less and less sway over artists as they were increasingly drawn to the cities—Vilnius, first and foremost. Rough woodcut and linocut prints were gradually replaced with techniques that required more precise patterns, such as etching, lithographs and, later, silkscreen printing.

 

The most modern and Western graphic artwork being created in the 1960s was designed by Gibavičius and Vincas Kisarauskas, as well as Vytautas Kalinauskas and Saulė Kisarauskienė.

 

The fish swimming through the uniformly placed zig-zag lines covering Gibavičius’ linocut work Vandenynų gyventojai (Inhabitants of the Seas, 1964) emerge as if from a work of optical art. The use of a square-format printing plate, a simple and sparse use of expression, and many different variations of the same subject theme (or perhaps even the mechanical repetition of that theme) also feature prominently in Gibavičius’ series of cardboard engravings called Pajacai (Clowns, 1965), depicting a lively jumping-jack against a background of a chessboard. A series of zinocraphic prints inspired by the poetry of Janina Degutytė and Jurgis Baltrušaitis illustrate Gibavičius’ passion for geometry and formal logic, modernism and historicism, as well as his effort to find harmony between innovative forms and references to the national cultural heritage. 126 prints in the series Vaikystės prisiminimai (Childhood Memories, 1977-1982) are comprised of 9, 16, 25, 36, 64 or 100 small squares, each containing the same images from a village farmstead, appearing as if viewed through an open window or a door left ajar. The past and memory become references, and traditional village culture becomes a personal experience examined over a distance of time and space.

 

The graphic artwork of Vincas Kisarauskas and the collections of his works published in book form are similar both in style and subject matter to the artist’s paintings. Jagged, angled figures, collapsed faces, tight geometric spaces, and a threatening contrast between black and white in his early cardboard and linocut engravings powerfully convey the tragedy, captivity, oppression, fear and loss experienced by the nation and its people. Here we encounter Kisarauskas’ favorite heroes, including knights, Oedipus, and the Prodigal Son, and we see the emergence of such motifs as intimate dialogues and conversations around a table, twins, signs of the Zodiac, or the Vilnius Old Town. Kisarauskas usually produced his prints using several plates and various different object surfaces to create collages and monotypes. From 1980 onward, his work evidences more use of linocuts with slanted figures outlined in thin, white geometric lines, imprisoned in boxes and shoved to the margins of a black background.

 

The turn away from rough expression toward more austere constructivism is also evident in art books created by Kisarauskas. At first glance, the books appear like intimate visual diaries or memoirs. Later, Kisarauskas carved letters and figures to give form and shape to pieces of texts: his wife’s poetry, Donelaitis’ The Seasons, Saint-John Perse’s Anabasis, or letters written by the Lithuanian composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis.

 

 

Younger artists in the 1970s employed contemporary methods to portray the present intertwined with world culture, its history and their own imagination. From the perspective of form and technique, the revival of graphic art benefitted considerably from the work of an informal trio of artists: Eduardas Juchnevičius, Mikalojus Vilutis, and Vytautas Jurkūnas, Jr.

 

Having completed a series of prints in 1968, toward the end of his studies, on ancient Baltic Prussia, Juchnevičius later placed the legendary Iron Wolf (the founding symbol of Vilnius) by his own feet in one image, or lined up rows of knights alongside biblical and mythological heroes, or Zeus alongside the Lithuanian Grand Duke Vytautas the Great. Like Krasauskas and Kisarauskas before him, Juchnevičius used the negative image characteristic of relief printing to his advantage. Patterns of white lines on black backgrounds on large format linocut prints were both constructive and grotesque, and bodies covered in innovatively styled armor today bear a resemblance to Greek vases or the aesthetic of cyberspace science fiction.

 

After graduating from the Art Institute in 1970, Vilutis continued his studies in Kiev, learning silkscreen printing and popularizing it at home in Lithuania. This decorative, pop art-related technique, saturated prints with bold colors and brilliant finished surfaces, and its expressive designs were reminiscent of caricature, allowing artists to modernize even the most ancient and historic images. Vilutis’ silkscreen works, emerging from quickly drawn designs, usually featured a single head, as in his rendering of the profile of face with a parachute above it, or the figure of a horrifying women with her arms aloft, or an aggressive giant gazing skyward. His creatures soon grew larger than the Earth itself, but their patterns became smaller and purely decorative elements began to appear. In the 1990s, Vilutis began creating collage imagery. Weightless, wounded figures appearing from the universe of various media and the artist’s own imagination met in a place bathed in the glow of sunset, though the imagined, gravity-free space was merely the surface of a sheet of paper with various found items arranged upon it.

 

Vytautas Jurkūnas experimented with nearly all known techniques: etching, woodcuts, black and white and colored linocuts, silkscreen printing. His prints abound with a joy for life. We find no traces of the past there, only the present, and we see the people whom the artist encounters around him, his imagination, humor, amusing stories, nude women, and a mood lifted from the works of Salinger and Kerouac. From the perspective of form, Jurkūnas’ graphic work is noted for its fluid and purposefully childish, stylized patterns, where human figures are often seen tousled about with the wind, while other works employ montage compositions and calligraphic text inscribed alongside his imagery.

 

Lithuania’s female graphic artists mainly worked with etching and lithography. Prints and poetry illustrations by Gražina Didelytė and Elvyra Katalina Kriaučiūnaitė were small in format, but their compositions were complex, often assembling images using contrasting fragments into puzzle-like creations. Freely undulating lines, white spaces surrounding human figures and plants, and depictions of weightlessness create a sublimely uplifting and nostalgic mood.

 

Jūratė Stauskaitė’s early etchings portrayed village life, but she soon turned her focus toward European culture and her experiences as a woman. In one image a woman sheds a Rococo dress to sit, naked, on a field with a dog nearby. Sparse and fragile black lines, almost disappearing into the whiteness of the surrounding page, eventually transform into calligraphically meticulous, sharp, and energetic forms. Fascinated with bodies and movement, Stauskaitė soon discovered dance, the central theme explored in her creative work. Sketch strokes transform into dance movements to inspire the souls of her audiences.

 

Gerardas Šlektavičius, who completed his schooling in graphic art in 1976, created a series of 6-color prints entitled Studijų metai (My Study Years) for his thesis project. The prints portrayed everyday student life at the Art Institute combining the silkscreen technique then in fashion with a classical, old-school image structure into a harmonious, multidimensional figure composition. Some of these were depictions of interior spaces from which the architecture of the Vilnius Old Town can be seen through unusually large windows. He later went on to create color linocuts on themes such as youth and old cities.