Juozas Zikaras

Biography

In 1906, while living in his native Paliūkai, Zikaras modelled a bust of a local landowner, Juozapas Kazakauskas. The fee was enough to take him to St Petersburg. That was how his professional training began.

He was born on 18 November 1881 (6 November, Old Style) in the village of Paliūkai, near Panevėžys, into a poor family. From the age of seven he herded livestock for farmers, learned carpentry and roofed buildings with his father. He carved and sold figurines of saints for roadside crosses, painting them in three colours: black, white and red. From 1897 to 1899 he attended a four-year school at Pumpėnai, then worked as a caretaker at the teachers’ seminary in Panevėžys, learned to play the violin and played in a small orchestra, spent a year in Latvia, and worked as a farmhand for the Pumpėnai parish priest and as a village teacher on an estate.

Patrons, among them the writer Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė and the linguist Jonas Jablonskis, helped him to study in Vilnius: in 1904–1906 he attended Ivan Trutnev’s drawing school and, in the evenings, the classes of Józef Montwiłł. In 1907–1910 he studied at the school of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts in St Petersburg, and in 1910 he entered the sculpture department of the Imperial Academy of Arts, under the professors Hugo Zaleman and Vladimir Beklemishev. In 1914 he married Anelė Tūbelytė.

He completed the Academy course in 1915, but had no time to finish his diploma work, “Mother”: he was drafted into the army. He did not go to the front. The unfinished “Mother” was nevertheless shown at the exhibition of diploma works, and in October 1916 Zikaras received his diploma and a silver medal. After demobilization he taught in Petrograd schools, among them drawing and technical drawing at the Shtemberg gymnasium and secondary school.

In 1918 the family returned to Lithuania. In Panevėžys Zikaras taught at the gymnasium and the teachers’ seminary, until about 1928. This was where the works that became symbols of the independent state appeared: the Statue of Liberty (1922), later set up in Kaunas, the first Lithuanian coins, a bas-relief for the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, busts and bas-reliefs of public figures, and statues of Saints Peter and Paul and others for churches in Panevėžys and nearby small towns. Among the busts are Jonas Basanavičius, the historian Simonas Daukantas, Vincas Kudirka and Matas Grigonis; among the bas-reliefs, President Antanas Smetona with his wife, and Jonas Šliūpas. There are medals of Vytautas, of Bishop Merkelis Giedraitis and of the writer Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas. In 1931 he made the “Atlantes” for a bank in Panevėžys, and at Rasos Cemetery in Vilnius he installed the gravestone of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis.

In 1928, at the invitation of the minister of education, the family moved to Kaunas. Zikaras taught at the Kaunas art school and headed its sculpture studio, and in 1932–1938 he was chairman of the Lithuanian Artists’ Society. The statue of the “Knygnešys” (the book smuggler; bronze, 1928–1939), a peasant with a sack of banned books who watches for border guards, was placed in the garden of the War Museum. The Statue of Liberty in front of the same museum is dated by some accounts to 1928, by others to 1921–1922. The coins of Lithuania of 1918–1940 were struck from his models, and in 1928 he made the medal for the tenth anniversary of independence. In 1937 he received the main prize at an exhibition in Paris for a model of a Lithuanian farmstead. In 1940 Zikaras began teaching at the Kaunas Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts; from 1941 he headed its department of sculpture and ceramics, and in 1944 he was given the title of professor. During the Second World War his three sons left for the United States and Australia; one of them, Teisutis, became a sculptor in Melbourne.

Zikaras died on 10 November 1944 in Kaunas. At that time the family was being pursued by the NKGB, the Soviet security service, which accused the sons of links with the “Forest Brothers”, the anti-Soviet partisans. He was buried at Petrašiūnai Cemetery.

His daughter Alytė preserved many of his works: from 1959 an unofficial exhibition was open in her father’s workshop in the basement of the house. The museum in his native Paliūkai was opened in 1972, the memorial museum in the Kaunas house in 2001.

The Statue of Liberty, removed from the square by the Soviet authorities, was restored on 16 February 1989.