Antanas Žmuidzinavičius

Biography

In 1918 the Council of Lithuania approved the design of a flag prepared by a commission of three: Jonas Basanavičius, Tadas Daugirdas and Žmuidzinavičius. At the Vilnius Conference in 1917 the hall had been decorated with a green and red flag of his making; the delegates found it too gloomy, and Daugirdas proposed adding a yellow stripe. The yellow, green and red tricolour is, in its essentials, still in use.

He was born on 31 October 1876 (19 October, Old Style) in Seirijai, then in the Suwałki Governorate. Less than two years later his parents bought a farm and moved to Balkūnai, near Alytus. His father had taken part in the uprising of 1863 and served a prison sentence in Sejny. Of eleven children, five lived to adulthood.

From 1890 to 1894 Žmuidzinavičius studied at the Veiveriai Teachers’ Seminary, then worked for several years as a teacher in village schools in Poland. There he began drawing in pencil and writing his first poems, in Polish and in Lithuanian. In 1899 he transferred to Warsaw, where he went on teaching while studying painting in private classes: with Wojciech Gerson and at the evening school of Evgeny Zolotarev. His first exhibitions in Warsaw took place in 1902 and 1904. In December 1904 he left for Paris, where he attended the Académie Colarossi and the Académie Vitti and studied with Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa. There he also joined a circle of Lithuanian students and met his future wife, Marija Putvinskaitė; they married in October 1909.

In 1906 he returned to Lithuania and settled in Vilnius. Together with Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Petras Kalpokas, Petras Rimša and others he organized the First Exhibition of Lithuanian Art and became chairman of the Lithuanian Art Society. In 1908 he founded the Vilnius Art Society, which brought together Polish, Russian and Jewish artists, among them Marianne von Werefkin. That same year he set out for Western Europe and the United States: he studied, visited museums, painted, gave lectures to Lithuanian communities on Lithuanian art and history, and raised money for a planned National House of the Lithuanian Scientific Society. In Munich he lived for four months with Kalpokas; in Chicago he painted backdrops for Lithuanian theatres. After Čiurlionis died in 1911, he took up the work of collecting and exhibiting his paintings. In 1912 he studied fresco painting in Hamburg, and in May 1914 he travelled with the zoologist Tadas Ivanauskas to the White Sea and brought back northern landscapes.

During the First World War he taught at the new Lithuanian teachers’ courses and at the Rytas Gymnasium, and for a time headed an orphanage. When Soviet forces took Vilnius in December 1918, he set up a commission to collect and safeguard the city’s artworks. From 1919, with a break, he lived in Kaunas. He took part in the wars of independence and was one of the founders of the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union. In 1921, together with Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas, he was charged with establishing the Vytautas the Great War Museum. He travelled to the United States in 1922–1924 to raise funds for the Riflemen and organized about two hundred meetings and lectures. The collection was modest, and his handling of the money was later criticized; an unofficial investigation, concluded in 1936, found the bookkeeping chaotic but no evidence of misappropriation.

From 1929 to 1934 he chaired the Riflemen’s Union and edited its magazine Trimitas, resigning in November 1934. He taught drawing at the Kaunas Art School from 1926. Among his design work are 32 postage stamps, the emblem of the Riflemen, a version of the coat of arms of Lithuania, and a design for the 10-litas banknote of 1927 showing a sower.

Most of his work consists of oil landscapes with a lyrical, slightly melancholic mood: the Neman, dunes, the hills of Samogitia, lone trees. Among them are “The Neman Before the Storm” (1912), “Two Pines” (1930), “Forest to the State” (1948) and the cycle “Here Will Be the Kaunas Sea” (1953–1965). He also painted portraits, including one of Tadas Daugirdas, made posters and illustrated books. He did not accept modernist experiments. It seems to me that his landscapes show clearly what he liked in nature: soft, warm, earthy tones and empty, quiet places.

After the Second World War he was not repressed, although his relatives the Putvinskis died in Soviet prisons and the family of one of them was deported. With his help two orphaned children returned to Lithuania in 1945. He was named Honored Artist of the Lithuanian SSR (1946) and People’s Artist of the Lithuanian SSR (1954), became a professor in 1947, and was made People’s Artist of the USSR in 1957. From 1953 he taught at the Kaunas Polytechnic Institute, from 1958 he was a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Arts, and in 1959–1963 he sat in the Supreme Soviet of the Lithuanian SSR. In 1961 his memoirs, “Palette and Life”, were published.

In 1961 he gave his collection of Lithuanian folk art to the Čiurlionis National Art Museum in Kaunas: clay whistles, sashes, aprons, carvings, paintings and letters. Separately he collected devils; the collection, according to tradition, began with a devil given to him by Vaižgantas.

He died in Kaunas on 9 August 1966 and was buried in Petrašiūnai Cemetery. That same year a memorial museum opened in his house. In 1982 a separate building was added for the devils, and today it holds more than three thousand exhibits.