Valentinas Antanavičius

Valentinas Antanavičius stands out as one of the most important artists of the Soviet Lithuania, someone who greatly enriched Lithuanian art with his uncompromising works. Together with Vincas Kisarauskas, he was the founder of assemblage as a technique in Lithuania and one of the first artists to develop it in the former USSR in the late 1960s.

Antanavičius was born into a humble peasant family that did not influence his choice of an artistic career path. In 1944, when he was eight years old, his family was forced to abandon their home in Lithuania’s countryside and wander for more than a year in eastern Germany before returning home. He vividly recalled how his grandmother died in one of the refugee camps. After returning from exile, he fell ill with a severe form of skeletal tuberculosis and spent nearly four years in a children’s hospital, where he had to lie still on sandbags, unable to move his lower body. It is likely that his wrenching early life experiences determined his exploration of physical suffering in his work.

Eventually, Antanavičius went on to graduate from the State Art Institute of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania (now the Vilnius Academy of Arts) and become a member of the Lithuanian SSR Artists’ Union (now the Lithuanian Artists’ Union). He taught at the Čiurlionis School of Arts and the Vienožinskis Art School.

Antanavičius’s oeuvre can be described as falling into two categories. On the one hand, like a number of Lithuanian artists, he was a “semi-nonconformist” painter who could outwardly seem to be following the contemporary Soviet regulations for painting, but underneath he created radical assemblages for his own artistic satisfaction.

In Antanavičius’s works, objects that are old, broken, dingy, and fragmented are ugly—yet somehow become beautiful, united into monumental compositions that evoke themes of tragedy, suffering, eroticism, and humor. Antanavičius’s figures are known for their gruesome bodies, like unwrapped mummies or dissected creatures that have already started to decay yet still display signs of living organisms. Horrifically crippled yet somehow comic, pathetic but dignified, his characters question the definition of human being. Above all, he was known for a penetrating irony in his works, foremost in his criticism of the Soviet government.

The objects in Antanavičius’s assemblages are remnants of the past. He created most of his assemblages before 1990, the year in which Lithuania, together with the other two Baltic states, declared their independence from the collapsing USSR. Objects that occupy the artist’s works are physical as well as metaphorical signifiers of Soviet reality.

The theme of suffering is evident in the process of his assemblages, where his physical martyrdom manifests itself with extra force and tangibility, as if by sawing, chopping, nailing, and deconstructing found objects the artist “tortures” his subjects. His brutality to the old objects that occupy his compositions becomes even more emphasized when he is dealing with the body of a doll. In the majority of his works, for example A Glimpse of the Sky (1975, MO Museum, Lithuania), body parts of dolls are attached to the base by nailing them down in such a way that the assemblage figures look like little plastic martyrs, condemned to suffer eternally before the eyes of their beholders. His assemblages containing doll parts can also suggest eroticism directly or metonymically, where the displacement of sexual body parts implies an erotic aura rather than direct sexuality.

His human figures look like mythological creatures from mystical tales, but when interpreted in the context of Soviet reality, a human being becomes an absurd entity, a mere toy in the ideological mechanism. Therefore, the artist’s works not only present an image of the Soviet past but also describe a person’s role in it. A human’s existence is often shown as a sad joke, for example in Man and Machine (Running), from the Ecological cycle (1972, MO museum, Vilnius, Lithuania).

Underneath the coarse outer surfaces of his assemblages lie principles of strong compositional organization—akin to those of the masters of Byzantine and Renaissance art—that determine their original character. Thus, on the one hand, works look monumental with a human figure often occupying the center of a composition, but on the other hand, these figures are tragic parodies of dignified human beings. Taking into consideration party officials’ attitude toward irony and the famous line by the proletarian writer Maxim Gorky, which was frequently recited during the Soviet era, “Man! That sounds . . . mighty!” [1] it becomes clear that Antanavičius’s works would not have been appreciated by supporters of official art. His surreal figures do not make the Soviets look mighty; rather, he represented Soviet life more realistically than any composition of socialist realism.

It is ironic, too, that by the 1990s, with the restoration of Lithuania’s independence and artists’ freedom from Soviet restrictions, the nonconformism of Antanavičius’s assemblages was to a great extent lost to contemporary viewers; however, they are eloquent reminders of a critical time in Lithuania’s political and cultural history. For that reason, Antanavičius abandoned the Soviet themes in his art and late in his career he madee mostly assemblages inspired by Lithuanian folk art. During those transitional years he was a member of Grupė 24 [Group 24], which was active from 1989 to 1999 and included semi-nonconformist painters and art critics. [2]

His work was controversial even among artists, as the more traditional painters Vladas Karatajus (1925–2014) and Vytautas Ciplijauskas (1927–2019) could not understand his work, yet his many of his contemporaries, the generation of Algimantas Jonas Kuras (b. 1940) and some earlier artists, including Antanas Gudaitis (1904–1989), admired his art. He was particularly close to Vincas Kisarauskas (1934–1988) and Antanas Kmieliauskas (1932–2019), as well as the graphic artists Algirdas Steponavičius (b. 1927) and Birutė Žilyte (1930–2024). He also was friends with writers such as Juozas Aputis (1936–2010), Jonas Mikelinskas (1922–2015), and Romualdas Lankauskas (1932–2020).

Paulius Andriuškevičius

Photo portrait 2000 by Algimantas Aleksandravičius

Notes

1. Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths (1902), trans. Laurence Irving (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912), 178.

2. Kęstutis Kuizinas and Regina Noruišytė, Grupė 24 [Group 24] (Vilnius: Šiuolaikinio meno centras, 1997).