The Romanticisms

Emerging as a countermovement to the rationalism of Classicism, Romanticism swept across Europe as a new artistic and literary movement that opened up space for emotions, dreams, and individualism. The genius of the creator began to be boldly exalted, spiritual values were elevated above material ones, and those seeking moral support or inspiration were encouraged to look backwards, to a past stretching back centuries. In Lithuania, however, Romanticism ‘lingered’; rather than yielding to Realism, which was gaining prominence in the West during the second half of the 19th century, it transformed into Neo-romanticism, or National Romanticism, which inventively employed the expressive means of Symbolism, Art Nouveau, and other contemporary styles. 

This distinctive transformation arose from Lithuania’s specific political and cultural situation. Forcibly incorporated into Tsarist Russia precisely when voices extolling personal and national freedom began spreading from the West, and having endured the failed November (1830–1831) and January (1863–1864) Uprisings with the deaths and exile of its bravest citizens, the land clung to its traditions more firmly than ever before. The bards of Romanticism – with pen, brush, and piano keys – tirelessly created for an entire century the image of the grand Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a dreamland and era shrouded in nostalgic mist, providing a space in which the nation could survive. 

The exhibition takes as its starting point the first volume of Adam Mickiewicz’s Poetry, published in Vilnius in 1822, for it was at Vilnius University that the Vilnius school of Romanticism, common to both Lithuanian and Polish culture, emerged and flourished. The endpoint is marked by the outbreak of the First World War (1914), which brought about great historical, political, and social changes in the region whilst also defining the thematic and chronological boundaries of the Vilnius Picture Gallery. 

The exhibition narrative has been constructed contextually to illuminate the connections and differences between local processes and international aesthetic and social developments. The exhibition thus invites us to view Romanticism as a cultural formation in which various art forms, politics, and social changes are closely intertwined, together creating a complex, multifaceted narrative that, in Lithuania’s case, is by no means always ‘romantic’.