At the very beginning of the 1950s, Valerija Čiurlionytė-Karužienė (1886–1982), a sister of the famous Lithuanian painter and composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911), wrote a letter to the Lithuanian Communist Party Central Committee. She proposed establishing a personal museum about M.K. Čiurlionis in the house where the Čiurlionis family lived. Jonas Zinkus (1917–1990), the deputy head of the Department of Art and Fiction of the Lithuanian Communist Party Central Committee, in a letter to Vladas Niunka (1907–1983), the secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party, rejected the idea. According to Zinkus, the museum would promote art which was alien and harmful to Soviet-Lithuanian society and culture.