New Aims, Old Means: Rewriting Lithuanian Art History of the National Revival Period
New Aims, Old Means: Rewriting Lithuanian Art History of the National Revival Period

Summary/Abstract: The article examines significant changes in the Lithuanian art history written at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, the period when the local modernist art-historical discourse went into decline. From the mid-1980s, Lithuanian researchers turned to contextual studies and concentrated on art processes and their social and political milieu. However, the essence of the modernist methodology – the concept of style interpreted as a quality intrinsic to an artwork and detectable from its visual appearance – retained its ideological power. It continued to connect Lithuanian art history with the peremptory Western modernist patterns, thus imposing modernist standards on reconstructions of local artistic practice that are in conflict with the new contextual approach. The article underscores the need to deconstruct the concept of style and to open an artwork to the contextual analysis.

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