Hunting for the phantom, or the prospects of studying nineteenth-century Lithuanian art

ENThis article analyses the state of nineteenth-century Lithuanian art historiography. It reviews how the nationalist paradigm prevalent in the humanities in the twentieth century was transformed into the writing of multi-national history at the end of the century, and in the early twenty-first century how it was increasingly replaced by a non-ethnocentric approach focused on the problems of urban culture, regional art, social class and gender. It examines the attempt to overcome the concept of the ‘shift’ espoused by Lithuanian art history research that asserts a strict division between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. At the same time, this article discusses why the progress of studies of nineteenth-century art considerably lags behind the vigorous development of research observed in studies of the baroque era, the first Republic of Lithuania and the Soviet period.