Traumatic images of the social body in Lithuanian painting of the period of 'stagnation'

The article focuses on the issue of art and politics during the years of'stagnation'. It offers analyses that indicate how the social body was represented in Lithuanian paintings of the 1970s. Painters of this period began to represent reality through specific signs of the social environment, i.e. through attributes of daily life, as it were a 'close up' of the body in society. The generation of painters that emerged in the early 1970s appropriated the principles of the expressive visual language of the 1960s; it tended to reject abstract, metaphorical representations of man and reality. Images of the body, banal objects and public space — these were the elements that became central to their painting; they often expressed problematic psycho-physiological and social-individual experiences. Artists often chose images and techniques that revealed their negative views of'post-totalitarian society' (Vaclav Havel's term) and highlighted the complex status of the subject in the Soviet system. The article analyzes the work of two young artists of the 1970s, Algimantas Kuras (b. 1940) and Arvydas Saltenis (b. 1944), as an example of social critique and the intermingling of both resistance and conformation in Soviet painting.[...]Vytauto Didžiojo universiteta