Winter Landscape

Mikas Šileikis (1893–1987) fled to the United States in 1913 after receiving his call-up papers to serve in the Imperial Russian army (refusing, as the historian Egidijus Aleksandravičius might put it, to lay down his life for the head of the prison of nations). Šileikis pursued his art education at the Art Institute of Chicago, an institution that was renowned both as a school and as a world-class art museum. The museum’s impressive collection of French Impressionist paintings, which are still on view today, shaped his artistic sensibilities, and left traces of Neo-Impressionism in his early work. Although his productivity declined in the second half of the 20th century, Šileikis was still popular and respected in the Lithuanian diaspora. His standing was further reinforced by his role in founding the Čiurlionis Art Gallery in 1957, which became a centre for Lithuanian culture in the United States, as well as his contributions to the multivolume Lithuanian Encyclopaedia published in Boston.

Text author Laura Petrauskaitė

Source: Law firm Valiunas Ellex art album THE WORLD OF LANDSCAPES II (2013). Compiler and author Nijolė Tumėnienė

Mikas Šileikis (1893–1987) fled to the United States in 1913 after receiving his call-up papers to serve in the Imperial Russian army (refusing, as the historian Egidijus Aleksandravičius might put it, to lay down his life for the head of the prison of nations). Šileikis pursued his art education at the Art Institute of Chicago, an institution that was renowned both as a school and as a world-class art museum. The museum’s impressive collection of French Impressionist paintings, which are still on view today, shaped his artistic sensibilities, and left traces of Neo-Impressionism in his early work. Although his productivity declined in the second half of the 20th century, Šileikis was still popular and respected in the Lithuanian diaspora. His standing was further reinforced by his role in founding the Čiurlionis Art Gallery in 1957, which became a centre for Lithuanian culture in the United States, as well as his contributions to the multivolume Lithuanian Encyclopaedia published in Boston.

Text author Laura Petrauskaitė

Source: Law firm Valiunas Ellex art album THE WORLD OF LANDSCAPES II (2013). Compiler and author Nijolė Tumėnienė