The émigré art collection by Leonardas Andriekus and the Franciscan brothers at Vytautas Kasiulis Museum of Art

At 6 pm Thursday, 8 May, Vytautas Kasiulis Museum of Art (A. Goštauto St 1, Vilnius) of the LNMA invites to the opening of the exhibition Open Waters: The Émigré Art Collection by Leonardas Andriekus and the Franciscan Brothers. The exhibition presents a unique collection of the Lithuanian émigré art, which was started to amass in the mid-20th century by the Franciscan priest Leonardas Kazimieras Andriekus. Nearly all of a hundred artworks on display have not yet been showcased publicly. The exhibition embraces the development of sacred and secular art of the diaspora and features such celebrated Lithuanian artists as Pranas Domšaitis, Adomas Galdikas, Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas, Viktoras Petravičius, Vytautas ir Aleksandra Kašubos, Elena Kepalaitė, Elena Urbaitytė, Nijolė Vedegytė-Palubinskienė, Janina Monkutė-Marks, Viktoras Vizgirda, Vladas Žilius, Kazimieras Žoromskis and many others. The exhibition will run until 28 September. 

“The title of this exhibition is borrowed from a collection of poetry released by Leonardas Kazimieras Andriekus in 1955, with which he made his debut in the United States. Open Waters serves as a metaphor for freedom and the unbridled spread of creativity; it is also a voicing of the unplanned and painful separation from one’s Homeland, of a future marked by uncertainty and anxiety. We have taken it so as to summarise the Franciscan brothers’ cultural activities in diaspora, in gathering Lithuanians together in a foreign land. By coming together to help Lithuanian artists, the Franciscans made a significant contribution to the fostering of art in emigration: they ran the Lithuanian press, built new churches, opened schools, and decorated churches, offices and residential spaces with professional works of art,” Ilona Mažeikienė, co-curator of the exhibition, places the event into historical context. 

The Franciscan Father dedicated to art 

Leonardas Kazimieras Andriekus (1914–2003) was a Franciscan priest, a poet, editor and a dedicated fosterer of culture in diaspora. After entering the Order of the Friars Minor, he took the name of Leonardas. He pursued studies in Austria and Italy, earning his doctoral degree in theology in Rome. In 1946, he moved to the East Coast of the USA, Kennebunkport, ME. He served as a senior and a provincial of the Lithuanian Franciscan Convent in Brooklyn, and rector of St Anthony’s Boys’ Gymnasium. He was editor of the newspapers Šv. Pranciškaus varpelis and Darbininkas, and of the art magazine Aidai. In 1992, he put efforts to relocate the publishing of the Aidai magazine to Lithuania, where it was merged with Naujasis Židinys published in Lithuania.  

Andriekus was an active figure of the émigré cultural life: he headed the Lithuanian Writers’ Society, the cultural centre Židinys founded in Brooklyn, and from 1976, the Adomas Galdikas’ Art Gallery. Working in the Aidai office, he established relations with numerous artists of the diaspora and started to collect their work. According to the writer Paulius Jurkus, he did this to “preserve these artworks for the future, and when circumstances would allow, to bring them back to Lithuania as an example of Lithuanian emigrants’ efforts under difficult conditions”.  Andriekus himself once openly admitted that among “the artists, it was the lyrical art by Adomas Galdikas, that was of great help to me in building a poetic vision of Lithuanian nature. I left Lithuania in the autumn of 1937, before I could spiritually take root in the nature of Lithuania. While the paintings of Galdikas, created here from his old drawings and from memory, opened to me the bucolic beauty of my Homeland. The twenty years of my friendship with Adomas Galdikas, which I spent observing the development of his artistic production, were an inspiration to write lyrical poetry. I have received plenty of aesthetic support, among other artists, from V. Vizgirda, T. Valius, V. K. Jonynas, P. Augius, V. Ignas.”

During several decades, Andriekus amassed a significant collection of the Lithuanian émigré art, and a collection of art from the Far East and the African nations. Today in is scattered across Franciscan convents in Vilnius, Kretinga, Klaipėda, Jurgaičiai. The works presented for the first time by the exhibition Open Waters show a broad spectrum from realism to expressionism, fauvism, abstraction and op art. The input of female artists into the culture of diaspora is also properly recognized.  

Father Julius Sasnauskas tenderly recollects Father Leonardas Andriekus 

“At noon 19 May, in a nursing home in Putnam, USA, Franciscan father Leonardas Andriekus died a quiet, lonely and poor death. A poet and an artist, in the most profound sense. Perhaps it was due to his Franciscan humiliation and obedience, perhaps also to the irony of life, that he became Doctor of the Canon Law – the owner of the title regarded it with a whimsical smile. During his entire life, almost for nine decades, his heart found solace and inspiration in other things, not the rules or the paragraphs of the law. He was passionately in love with poetry, the arts and the mysteries of nature. The Knight of Beauty, he remained faithful to the ideal till his last days, though himself was so small and delicate man as to be nicknamed, somewhat mockingly, Baby Jesus by his immediate environment. Back in a day, the Aidai magazine, and the émigré Lithuanian Writers’ Society rested on Father Leonardas’ shoulders, and the convent buildings in Brooklyn and Kennebunkport, transformed by his love of creativity and art into museums, treasuries of art. Already in the nursing home, in that sterile, impersonal room, he liked to wear a watch on each of his hands. “There is nothing else beautiful left to me here,” he would explain with a sorrowful smile.”     

The life of Father Leonardas Andriekus, as noted by the priest, was the embodiment of the Franciscan charisma. Even in his old age he secretly fed racoons, foxes, crows, because he knew no otherwise, bearing witness of his faithfulness to St Francis of Assisi. 

 

Curators: Rasa Adomaitienė, Ilona Mažeikienė, Birutė Pankūnaitė

Consultant Father Julius Sasnauskas OFM

Architect Austė Kūliešiūtė-Šemetė

Designer Jurgis Griškevičius

Restorators: Lina Ona Adomaitytė, Rasa Bieliauskaitė-Mikolaitienė, Jurgita Blažytė-Denapienė, Rimvydas Derkintis, Dalia Jonynaitė, Rūta Kasiulytė, Linas Lukoševičius, Daiva Petrauskaitė, Janita Petrauskienė, Eglė Piščikaitė, Rytė Šimaitė, Algis Vaneikis, Paulius Zovė

Project organizers: Vytautas Kasiulis Museum of Art of the LNMA, Lithuanian St Casimir’s Province of the Order of Friars Minor 

Partner Maironis Lithuanian Literature Museum

Information partner Bernardinai.lt