This evocative and wide-ranging set of articles is a forceful demonstration of how much the experience of East-Central and Eastern Europe, largely neglected until now, needs to be integrated into evolving scholarship on the era of the world wars. The collection diagnoses the challenge of achieving an enlarged historical and artistic perspective, and then goes on to meet it. Themes that are universal (exile, loss, trauma, survival, memory) and the undying subjects of art and artistic efforts at representation, here find specific expression. The case of Lithuania and its diverse populations is revealed in its full significance for a modern European history of the impact of the age of the world wars.
Price: $119.00
Pages: 326
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Imprint: Academic Studies Press
Series: Lithuanian Studies without Borders
Publication Date:
18 August 2016
Trim Size: 9.21 X 6.14 in
ISBN: 9781618115072
Format: Hardcover
"The Art of Identity and Memory provides rich and rare material on how Europe’s twentieth century was shaped by war. If the political and military history of Europe’s eastern frontiers have been extensively chronicled and analyzed, it is only in recent years that local scholars with access to archives and equipped with the requisite linguistic and critical skills have begun to unlock the cultural history of those regions that witnessed the most intense devastation. The publication of this book testifies to the emergence of a new generation of world-class scholars from the region, who are busily filling in the blank spaces of national historiographies with genuinely transnational approaches to the past."
— Violeta Davoliute, Joseph P. Kazickas Associate Research Scholar, Yale University, Senior Researcher, Faculty of History, Vilnius University
Giedrė Jankevičiūtė is a senior researcher at the Art History and Visual Culture Department of the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute and teaches at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Her current field of interest lies in artistic culture of occupied countries. Her monographs include Valstybė ir dailė: dailės gyvenimas Lietuvos Respublikoje 1918–1940 (Art and State: Art and Artistic Life in the Lithuanian Republic, 1918–1940, 2003) and The Graphic Arts in Lithuania 1918–1940 (2008). She has edited the catalogues Under the Red Star: Lithuanian Art in 1940–1941 (2011) and The Realities of Occupation: Posters in Lithuania during World War I and World War II (2014, with Laima Laučkaitė). She organized the international conference “Art and Artistic Life during Two World Wars” (Vilnius, 2011, with Laima Laučkaitė) and edited a collection of articles with the same title prepared on the basis of the presentations read at the conference (2012, with Laima Laučkaitė). Currently she is writing a monograph on Lithuanian art and artistic culture from 1939 to 1944 and compiling a book on the art historian Mikalojus Vorobjovas (Nikolai Worobiow, 1903–54), who was active in Lithuania in the mid-twentieth century.
Preface
Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius
Foreword
Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Rasutė Žukienė
Chapter 1: The Art of Walking in Wartime Wilna
Laimonas Briedis
Chapter 2: Jewish Vilnius in the Works of German Artists
Laima Laučkaitė-Surgailienė
Chapter 3: The Diaries of Death
Agnė Narušytė
Chapter 4: Art as a Narrative of Everyday Life in Lithuania during World War II
Giedrė Jankevičiūtė
Chapter 5: Trying to Survive: The Activity of Exiled Baltic Artists in Germany in 1945–1950
Rasa Žukienė
Chapter 6: The Memory and Representation of World War I in Lithuania
Rasa Antanavičiūtė
Chapter 7: The Limits of the Blockade Archive
Natalija Arlauskaitė
Chapter 8: Constructing Blocks of Memory: Post-Holocaust Narratives of Jewish Vilna
Larisa Lempertienė
Chapter 9: World War II Memory and Narratives in the Music of the Lithuanian Diaspora and Soviet Lithuania
Rūta Stanevičiūtė
Authors
List of Illustrations
Index
