Akvilė Mikėnaitė: gyvenimo prasmė - liaudies menas

LTAkvilė Mikėnaitė (1912-2001) -muziejininkė, nusipelniusi kultūros veikėja (1965), visą gyvenimą pašventė liaudies meno puoselėjimui ir propagavimui. Dar karui nesibaigus atėjusi dirbti į Vilniaus dailės muziejų (dab. Lietuvos dailės muziejus), ji, galima sakyti, iš nieko sukūrė Liaudies meno skyrių, kurio rinkinius šiandien sudaro tūkstančiai eksponatų. Šviesaus atminimo žmogui skiriama knyga radosi iš pagarbos ir dėkingumo. Ši knyga sudėliota iš gražių prisiminimų apie Akvilę Mikėnaitę ir jos asmeniniame archyve rastų neskelbtų straipsnių, kuriuose, be grynai specialių liaudies meno tyrinėjimo dalykų, atidesnis skaitytojas pajus begalinę meilę savo tautai ir didžiavimąsi jos vidinėmis galiomis.

ENThis book is dedicated to Akvilė Mikėnaitė (1912-2001) - Merited Figure of Culture (1965), a museum curator, lecturer. She began to work at the museum right after war and devoted most of her creative years to the fostering, accumulation and investigation of folk art. She was born on 10'1' April 1912 in a remote Skardupis individual farm of Aknysta rural district at the border of Lithuania and Latvia. She was the youngest in the family of Jokūbas and Teklė Mikėnas. Besides her, there were two more brothers and a sister in the family. The eldest brother Jonas - an officer, a pilot-tester, in the post-war period - a known ceramicist, Juozas - a prominent sculptor, her sister Liuda - a sincere village woman who took care of their home for long years, where the scattered family was always happy to return (now the Mikėnas family farmstead - a memorial museum). Akvilė wenr to a Lithuanian primary school at Aknysta, and in 1927-1931 - a state Latvian gymnasium in Subatė. From 1932 studied world history at the Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas. She attended lectures delivered by outstanding philosophers, historians, archaeologists, linguists and men of letters - L. Karsavinas, P. Galaunė, I. Jonynas, A. Sapoka, A. Janulaitis, E. Volteris, J. Puzinas, J. Baltrušaitis, V. Sezemanas, V. Mykolaitis-Putinas, V. Krėvė-Mickevičius and others. Her attitude to the studies was very serious. She devoted much time to reading and was maturing her own way of thinking. It was the collections of folk art she saw in the Čiurlionis Gallery in Kaunas during her first visit that awoke her vocation. She had a great ambition to get a deep insight into the power of folk art. It was not by chance that the theme of her final diploma project at the university was folk sculpture. In 1939 she passed her final exams with excellent marks and presented her diploma project extremely well.When part of the university was transferred to Vilnius, she got her graduation diploma also in Vilnius. In 1940 she began to work at Vilnius University. Until 1961 she held a teaching post at the Faculty of History and Philology: she lectured on museology science, Lithuanian, Latvian, Slavic folk art, Lithuanian history of art and other subjects. She was also a supervisor of the students' industrial practice, an academic advisor of their yearly and diploma projects. The offer of Levas Karsavinas to work at the Vilnius Art Museum from the autumn of 1944 equaled the present of her destiny - it had been her dream since her study years. On the instructions of Karsavinas she was entrusted with the care of folk art. In the autumn of 1944 she found a mere hundred and fifty exhibit in a war-torn museum. She understood what kind of work was ahead of her and took it up. She worked with all her strength. Organized folk art exhibitions, wrote articles and books, went on expeditions and headed them even for 35 years, traversed Lithuania far and wide. She did not count time and spare herself. The aim of the expeditions was to collect artistic folk art objects, fix rapidly vanishing traditional cultural phenomena. Today, the museum boasts nearly 25 thousand exhibits of fine and applied folk art. [...].This book contains a biographical essay of Akvilė Mikėnaitė, reminiscences of her colleagues, relatives, former students. A. Mikėnaitė was the first in Lithuania to begin investigations into the symbols of the sun in Lithuanian folk art. This publication also includes her article on this theme, summarizing the material accumulated in the course of long years: on the motifs of the sun and ornamentation, their variety in separate folk art branches and ethnic regions, as well as the article on the famous god-carver Vincas Svirskis, and a handful of reminiscences about the lecturer and colleague Professor Paulius Galaunė. When putting A. Mikėnaitė's manuscript heritage in order, a batch of reports on the expeditions throughout Lithuania was discovered. Some of them are included in the book, they can serve as a good source of information for the investigators of folk art. The majority thought highly of Akvilė Mikėnaitė as a qualified lecturer, experienced museum curator, and a sympathetic, kind-hearted person. She was a very modest, romantic and at the same time a life disaster-hardened personality. She will remain such in the memory of younger generation museum curators - with a noble face furrowed by life wrinkles, simple, sincere, striving persistently to reach her goal.