DRAUGAS NEWS Lithuanian World Wide News in English
by Tom Gregg (Grigonis)
Prologue
A modern five-year-old Amer
ican child’s exposure to the world is often confined largely to family, children’s picture books and television kid shows. Supplementing my personal mix back in the early Jet Age, from halfway across another continent came an adult’s book kept in the living room bookcase. Mom’s veteran pen pal Teklė in Kaunas had sent it as a gift, a 1957 volume of art reproductions done in the original by a landscape painter after whom the book was simply titled: “Žmuidzinavičius”.
Even a browsing preteen could see that the man with the strange long name was good, really good. Decades would pass, though, before I discovered his extraordinary breadth of achievement. For Antanas Žmuidzinavičius was not only perhaps the best Lithuanian painter of his generation after Mikalojus Čiurlionis, but also an educator, author, patriot, poet, organizer and, in the course of his worldwide travels, an advocate of Lithuanian culture.
Getting his bearings, 1876–1890
Little of this future was foretold in Antanas’ early years, as outlined best in his 1961 autobiography “Paletė ir gyvenimas” (Palette and Life). His parents, Jonas and Agatha, had been neighbors growing up along a street heading into the heart of Seirijai village in rural Alytus county. Such proximity among future couples was not unusual in the heavily forested, lightly populated, generally impoverished Lithuanian region of Dzūkija, where inhabitants routinely spent their entire lives.
Antanas was fourth among five children who survived to adulthood. When Antanas was still an infant, his father bought a farm in nearby Balkūnai. Jonas was a highly skilled carpenter, constructing by himself there a home of greatly admired sophistication and assorted farm implements. In his spare time – what there was of it – Jonas liked to recount his participation in the 1863 uprising. At twenty-one he had narrowly avoided execution by the Tsar’s Cossacks quelling the rebellion. He got away with serving a year’s prison sentence instead. Later, during the 40-year press ban of Lithuanian books printed in the Latin alphabet, Jonas would be active as a book smuggler.
Antanas’ mother Agatha was maternally affectionate, a solid cook, a locally consulted doctor of herbal medicine, and an energetic spiritual director. Having acquired a prayer book before marriage at the age of eighteen, she would recite all of the prayers in it by heart in church. This was merely a proud pretense of reading, however, as she was almost illiterate. In keeping with the impositions on her generation of women, she had never received formal schooling.
While Antanas fleshed out the characters of his parents nicely in his autobiography (which we refer to hereafter as “PAL”), little is written there about his two sisters and eldest brother Mykolas. He and younger brother Petras attended primary school together, from which Antanas graduated with distinction. When leaving the school after the ceremony, father Jonas patted his thirteen-year-old son on the head and said, “Well, now nothing will stop you from helping us work at home.” Jonas had a labor-intensive farm to run after all.
Learning and teaching, 1890–1900
Only after the intercession of several teachers was Dad persuaded to allow Antanas to continue his education at the Veiveriai Teachers’ Seminary. Located a long 70 km wagon ride north of his home in Balkūnai, the Teachers’ Seminary was a state prep school with an enrollment of about a hundred, housed in a former post office building. After the 1863 uprising, all Lithuanian institutions of higher learning had been closed or replaced by Russian schools as part of an intense Russification initiative. Veiveriai was one of just two institutions opened in Lithuania to train teachers for positions in these schools and their counterparts in the Polish provinces. In theory, trainees were to become infused with the Russian spirit and would spread this feeling among their future charges.
Instead, as a detailed Wikipedia essay about the school explains, the Veiveriai Teachers’ Seminary wound up being a center of the Lithuanian national revival movement. Led by school cofounder and veteran faculty member Tomas Žilinskas, pupils were encouraged to speak publicly in the otherwise forbidden Lithuanian language and read and distribute banned Lithuanian language books. PAL avoids the subject of his own devotion to the cause, noting only that Žilinskas was a “tough love-type” teacher of mathematics. But Antanas’ sentiments in this regard are revealed by a telling passage from a poem that he wrote here while a senior (“Lithuania has been calling us for freedom for a long time, now we have a deadly fight ahead of us”).
Upon graduation at the age of 17 in 1894, however, Antanas’ immediate concern was landing his first teaching job. He requested a position in Lithuania but there were none available for native Lithuanians, who were usually sent to Poland. His first teaching assignment was in the town of Zawada in southwest Poland, and his second at Waniewo, clear across the country near the Belarus border. Both locations were an outdoorsman’s paradise, which catered to his own taste. It was in this 3-year time frame that Antanas decided to combine his longtime love of nature with art and turn painting into a vocation. But at the time he was strictly an amateur, and limited his works of art to sketching with a pencil. Painting, he felt, was the means to express himself most fully.
Reconnecting and connecting, 1900–1906
To further his aspirations to paint, Antanas knew that he would need training, and he targeted Warsaw as a first step. The city offered a degree of cultural sophistication far beyond anything he’d previously been exposed to, including widely admired art museums and a noted art school. To financially support his studies at the latter, he offered to take the lowest category teaching position in town. This primary school job enabled him to attend night classes, and later participate in a joint independent study group of fellow novices. None of these did he recall by name almost sixty years later in PAL, but he does write about his acquaintance in Warsaw with Čiurlionis and sculptor-in-training Petras Rimša through the local chapter of the “Lithuanian Charitable Society.” Rimša would go on to fashion the famed “Lithuanian School” sculpture of mother and child at the spinning wheel.
Having gleaned all he could artistically from Warsaw during a 4-year stay there, Žmuidzinavičius headed to Paris and that city’s most prominent art school. By 1902, he had been featured in several art exhibitions and was able to get several of his poems published. He felt sure enough of his developing talents to scratch out a living in Paris by sketching and painting without turning to teaching. Through local Lithuanian contacts, Antanas met individuals he would see again back home, including Antanas Vivulskis, architect of the Three Crosses Hill monument. But perhaps his most important contact in Paris was a seemingly trivial one, with an expatriate dental student. Soon after his arrival in Paris, Marija Putvinskaitė was referred to him as a person to see about lodging and orientation. Making small talk and sipping tea in her lodgings and sizing up the plain, prim, precise daughter of Lithuanian nobility, he would later recall his immediate reaction: “I didn’t think any man could fall in love with her. But such a man appeared after all. It was me.”
New associations, 1906–1914
In any event, Antanas would finish ingesting his art studies and proceed to seek his own style and output the results. That search is evident in the diversity of his works created during the pre-war period. The decision to engage in Art back home was greatly encouraged by the Tsar’s loosening of the stranglehold on Lithuanian culture in 1904. Undoubtedly, this development influenced other elite art students training abroad, too. Rimša was an early returnee, and was concerned with the status of Art in Lithuania. Writing in the newly resurrected Vilnius press in April 1905, Rimša advocated for the formation of an alliance of all Lithuanian artists and for public support of them. In his view, the material support might first manifest as an art exposition which would include heretofore ignored homeland folk artists and their wood, metal, and cloth crafts.
Rimša’s proposal met with mixed reactions, and inaction reigned for over a year before Žmuidzinavičius moved to the capital to assist. Many aspects of his character furthered this effort, organizing, attention to detail, charismatic interpersonal skills and a high energy level among them. Quickly Antanas assembled a committee and arranged to solicit artists far and wide for contributions, with the press enlisted in the promotional effort. The three former Warsaw acquaintances Rimša, Čiurlionis and Žmuidzinavičius wound up trimming over 600 submissions to 450 for the first alliance art show that was held in early 1907. The trio included their own works in heading up an array of wonderful art, which included sculptures by Juozas Zikaras. Zikaras would be immortalized later as the creator of the Lithuanian statue of liberty now seen outside Kaunas War Museum.
The show’s success tremendously increased the self-esteem and image of the participating artists and encouraged the formation of the Lithuanian Art Society the following year. With Žmuidzinavičius as chairman, the Society would stage similar annual expositions in Vilnius and elsewhere through 1914, adding other ambitious touches that included presentation of books and art lectures. These activities helped boost the society membership to nearly 400 by 1914. But no undertaking was more ambitious than a long-range plan to gather works by Lithuanian artists and build a museum to house them. To this end, Antanas spent considerable time in America fundraising in 1908 and 1909. There was some sightseeing on the side, and during his trips he instituted elementary education classes in the U.S. for the often illiterate first wave Lithuanian immigrants.
Antanas’ friend Marija Putvinskaitė meanwhile was deeply involved with the Society’s inner workings and provided key support during her beau’s absence in America. They finally married in October 1909, in a ceremony in which Lithuanian founding father Jonas Basanavičius served as best man. They settled in a flat above Marija’s dental office in Vilnius and remained there through World War I, welcoming their only child in 1913.
Wartime Intermission, 1914–1921
Historian Theodore Weeks, one of few to study the war’s impact on Lithuania, does an admirable job of outlining the big picture dynamics in articles and books. But given Žmuidzinavičius’s writing skill and gift for detail, his own account in PAL is equally effective in personalizing the strains and privations endured by Lithuanians at the time.
At the War’s start, Antanas was a new father and pushing forty, which didn’t exempt him from the Tsar’s draft. He spent the first months procuring a year’s deferment based on phantom medical complaints, by which time the Germans had taken over Vilnius for the duration. Antanas writes of new landlords and worsening problems in trying to additionally support this new occupying force. With the city’s numerous soup kitchens overwhelmed, the populace was sometimes reduced to subsisting on unfortunate house pets. Žmuidzinavičius himself recalls bartering with German troops for a barrel of suspect horsemeat. On another day he encountered a child on the street searching for her missing mother; her brother was back home in bed, too weak to stand. Given all these problems, Antanas’ inability to circulate freely outside the city to do sketches for paintings during this time seems almost petty. But that too was a trial, and artistically limiting.
As Prof. Weeks has noted, Lithuania’s war didn’t end with the November 1918 armistice as there were multiple military groups keen on filling the power vacuum created by the exiting Germans. Other sources commonly refer to Žmuidzinavičius as being a participant in the chaotic war for independence that took place at this time without elaborating on the precise chronological extent of it nor the degree of hazard. That chore seems to have been left to him in his first published book titled Priešui ir tėvynei (For the Enemy and the Homeland). The 1931 volume holds out a greater hope for a telling of his side of the story than of a researcher ever locating a copy today.
First Independence, 1921–1940
After World War I, except for a brief flash in 1920, the Lithuanian Art Society was never again a cultural factor and had disappeared entirely by 1940. Žmuidzinavičius attributed its passing in part to deep philosophical differences. On one side were traditionalists like himself favoring accommodation to public tastes by emphasizing realism, while on the other were younger abstract art devotees who were more concerned with self-expression. Possibly too, after having their mutual sense of worth lifted through the Art Society’s pre-war efforts, everyone felt less inclined to band together for emotional support. Regardless, artworks collected for the hoped-for Society museum which never materialized wound up at the Lithuanian state’s new National Art Museum in Kaunas.
and Marija Putvinskaitė-Žmuidzinavičienė posing with only child Giedrė. Online research today reveals little of the daughter beyond that she followed her father into teaching and died in 2006. (Courtesy Anfate of other artists with nationalist Antano Žmuidzinavičiaus kūrinių ir rinkinių muziejus Facebook page)
Refocusing, Žmuidzinavičius served the newly independent Lithuanian state by designing new currency banknotes, over thirty different postage stamps, badges for the army, and the emblem of the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union. He briefly and futilely tried to raise funds in the U.S. for the latter institution that was founded in 1919 by his brother-in-law and continues today as a state-supported national defense group.
His wife and daughter would often join him on trips abroad now, Antanas devoting two entire PAL chapters to itineraries. With international travel out for homebound Lithuanians in the Soviet era, portraits of such as Yellowstone National Park and the Mammoth crystal caves in Kentucky in his autobiography must have served then as a fascinating highlight for readers.
In the period bridging the first independence era and Soviet years, home for Antanas and Marija now was Kaunas, where they moved after the war and where Antanas taught at the art school.
Securing a Legacy, 1940–1966
Pointedly, Žmuidzinavičius made no mention of the nationalist-linked activities above in his 1961 book. There was an ongoing cooperation with the new authorities that helped him avoid the dire fate of other artists with nationalist sentiments or ties, Juozas “Statue of Liberty” Zikaras being a notable example. Žmuidzinavičius is to be excused for relying on tact and charm and not choosing a more difficult path, already being 64 years of age when the Soviets voted themselves into power in 1940 Lithuania. Freedom fighting is a young man’s job. Regardless, his consent made everything that followed for him possible in Soviet times: continued use of his longtime landmark-grade residence and studio, an honored faculty position, and multiple selections as a designated artist of the people. International travel may have been out, but numerous other advantages of deference remained.
Taking everything from start to finish together, uncensored, the variety of Antanas’ involvements frustrates easy characterization. Functionally he was many things. But certainly one can argue for putting artist with enduring works atop the list. Commenting perceptively on the Žmuidzinavičius landscape catalog overall, Encyclopedia Lituanica says:
“In his art nature is not subjected to fierce storms, nor is there the grey gloominess of autumn, which clouds the daily life of a peasant bent under the yoke of toil. A rainy or a cloudy day, exactly like a sunny one, evokes a peaceful, idyllic mood when the laborer, forgetting the privations of his life, delights in the beauties of nature. In this respect, he could be called the bard of Lithuanian peasants, who sang of what was dearest and most beautiful about their land.” Exactly.
