Art of Identity and Memory

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.

"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."

• 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