Before the eruption: Lithuanian MAGMA chamber

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Moterų dailė; Feminizmas; Sovietmečio Lietuvos dailininkės moterys; Women's art; Feminism; Soviet-era Lithuanian women artists.

ENHistoricity is intrinsic to the concept of the exhibition MAGMA. According to its curators Benedetta Carpi De Resmini and Laima Kreivytė, the title of the exhibition refers to the 1977 international women artists’ exhibition by the same name held in Verona. The thirty-year chronological gap (the Italian women artists’ works shown are from as early as 1965, whereas Lithuanian women artists’ only from 1995, with the exception of the 1983 self-portraits by photographer Violeta Bubelytė) highlights the fact that for Lithuanian women artists, feminist issues only became relevant after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The aim of this essay is to add a further dimension to the issues the exhibition curators have raised, as well as to present the work of some Soviet-era Lithuanian women artists who can and should be included in the Lithuanian feminist narrative, thus broadening its scope. The generally accepted history of 20th century women’s art is based largely on the classic feminine, feminist, female model proposed by Elaine Showalter (1941), which corresponds to the respective three phases of imitation of men’s means of expression (writing in Showalter’s view), protest against male forms of expression, and finally, self-awareness. Showalter links the beginning of the latter phase with the end of WWI. In Lithuanian 20th century visual arts, we can recognize the feminine and female strategies, which coexisted from the 1930s on, but the feminist critical approach only appeared at the very end of the 20th century, supplanting the first two. [...]. [Extract, p. 63]