Postcard from Vilnius
A couple of weekends ago, I visited Vilnius at the invitation of the CAC, for the opening of the Baltic triennial (which I’ll be reviewing for the January issue of the magazine so won’t go into here but I must say it was one of the the busiest openings I have ever seen). I had never been to the city before – the capital of Lithuania, the southernmost of the three Baltic states and, in the 14th century, the largest country in Europe – and found it both fascinating and depressing. Simon Rees, the Australian curator of CAC was a great guide. Vilnius is an amazingly pretty town – cobbled streets, painted shutters, gables and Baroque churches – but it’s a scarred and haunted place. In the 20th century alone it was taken over by Poland in 1920, then Germany in 1939, then the Soviet Union in 1940, then, once again by Nazi Germany in 1941. After the final retreat of the Germans, in 1944, the Soviets once again took it over, establishing the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, which lasted until 11 March 1990, when Lithuania declared its independence – the first Soviet Republic to do so.
The country suffered horrifically during the war – around 780,000 Lithuanians died. Before World War II, Jews made up roughly half of the population in Vilnius – the town was known as ‘Little Jerusalem’ and had 105 active synagogues. During the war, the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators murdered around 94% of the Jewish population. There is no memorial in the city to this atrocity and, bizarrely, the town’s ‘Museum of Genocide Victims’, which is located in the former KGB headquarters – which was, during the earlier part of the war the Gestapo headquarters – makes no mention of the genocide of the Jewish population. Apparently the museum’s ‘logic’ is that it’s devoted to the genocide carried out by the Soviets upon the local population – and by the time they came to power, there were very few Jews left. I tried to question the woman behind the desk about the museum’s sinister policy, but she suddenly and rather mysteriously lost the power to speak English.
Simon took me to the small, local Holocaust museum but the door was locked. We could see a man asleep on a desk inside, a bottle of Vodka beside him, so we left. After taking me for a walk through the streets of the old Jewish Ghetto, where some old signs in Hebrew had been discovered beneath more recent paint-job
Simon then directed me to the Jewish museum, which was open. On the way, I passed dusty, graffitied, windows. The Jewish Museum, located in a non-descript building on a quiet street, was full of the almost unbearable history of Lithuanian Jews but very few artifacts. The first Jewish museum had opened in Vilnius in 1913. On the eve of World War II, the museum had accumulated more than 6000 books, thousands of historical and ethnographic works and documents, publications, periodicals in 11 languages, a rich folklore collection and 3000 art works. It was nearly all destroyed in the war.
On a more cheerful note, Simon organized a visit to the extraordinary, recently opened National Gallery of Art. We walked there, through the autumnal streets, and across a bridge guarded by Soviet sculptures.
The bridge also had some locks attached to it – it’s a tradition in the city for lovers to paint their names onto them and attach them to the railings for eternity.
At the NGA, the dynamic head of the museum, Lolita Jablonskiene, gave us a tour of the beautiful spaces housing the collection of Lithuanian art and of the installation-in-progress of Cold War Modern, which has traveled to the NGA from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. It looked incredible – seeing this work in a former Soviet-controlled country certainly added a frisson to the viewing experience. Simon Rees wrote a report on the controversial opening of the gallery for the frieze website in May.
Wandering around this amazing gallery, I fell totally in love with these sculptures, made by an artist I had never heard of before, Matas Mencinskas – just another extraordinary artist who died in the war.
A couple of weekends ago, I visited Vilnius at the invitation of the CAC, for the opening of the Baltic triennial (which I’ll be reviewing for the January issue of the magazine so won’t go into here but I must say it was one of the the busiest openings I have ever seen). I had never been to the city before – the capital of Lithuania, the southernmost of the three Baltic states and, in the 14th century, the largest country in Europe – and found it both fascinating and depressing. Simon Rees, the Australian curator of CAC was a great guide. Vilnius is an amazingly pretty town – cobbled streets, painted shutters, gables and Baroque churches – but it’s a scarred and haunted place. In the 20th century alone it was taken over by Poland in 1920, then Germany in 1939, then the Soviet Union in 1940, then, once again by Nazi Germany in 1941. After the final retreat of the Germans, in 1944, the Soviets once again took it over, establishing the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, which lasted until 11 March 1990, when Lithuania declared its independence – the first Soviet Republic to do so.
The country suffered horrifically during the war – around 780,000 Lithuanians died. Before World War II, Jews made up roughly half of the population in Vilnius – the town was known as ‘Little Jerusalem’ and had 105 active synagogues. During the war, the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators murdered around 94% of the Jewish population. There is no memorial in the city to this atrocity and, bizarrely, the town’s ‘Museum of Genocide Victims’, which is located in the former KGB headquarters – which was, during the earlier part of the war the Gestapo headquarters – makes no mention of the genocide of the Jewish population. Apparently the museum’s ‘logic’ is that it’s devoted to the genocide carried out by the Soviets upon the local population – and by the time they came to power, there were very few Jews left. I tried to question the woman behind the desk about the museum’s sinister policy, but she suddenly and rather mysteriously lost the power to speak English.
Simon took me to the small, local Holocaust museum but the door was locked. We could see a man asleep on a desk inside, a bottle of Vodka beside him, so we left. After taking me for a walk through the streets of the old Jewish Ghetto, where some old signs in Hebrew had been discovered beneath more recent paint-job
Simon then directed me to the Jewish museum, which was open. On the way, I passed dusty, graffitied, windows. The Jewish Museum, located in a non-descript building on a quiet street, was full of the almost unbearable history of Lithuanian Jews but very few artifacts. The first Jewish museum had opened in Vilnius in 1913. On the eve of World War II, the museum had accumulated more than 6000 books, thousands of historical and ethnographic works and documents, publications, periodicals in 11 languages, a rich folklore collection and 3000 art works. It was nearly all destroyed in the war.
On a more cheerful note, Simon organized a visit to the extraordinary, recently opened National Gallery of Art. We walked there, through the autumnal streets, and across a bridge guarded by Soviet sculptures.
The bridge also had some locks attached to it – it’s a tradition in the city for lovers to paint their names onto them and attach them to the railings for eternity.
At the NGA, the dynamic head of the museum, Lolita Jablonskiene, gave us a tour of the beautiful spaces housing the collection of Lithuanian art and of the installation-in-progress of Cold War Modern, which has traveled to the NGA from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. It looked incredible – seeing this work in a former Soviet-controlled country certainly added a frisson to the viewing experience. Simon Rees wrote a report on the controversial opening of the gallery for the frieze website in May.
Wandering around this amazing gallery, I fell totally in love with these sculptures, made by an artist I had never heard of before, Matas Mencinskas – just another extraordinary artist who died in the war.
