COURAGE

connecting collections

Founders of the gallery included critics Wiesław Borowski, Anka Ptaszkowska, and Mariusz Tchorek, as well as artists Henryk Stażewski, Zbigniew Gostomski, Edward Krasiński, and Roman Owidzki. Soon, Tadeusz Kantor joined the group of permanent collaborators. From the very beginning, the activities of the gallery and the artistic life of the circle of people involved in it were documented by two of the most acclaimed Polish photographers – Eustachy Kossakowski and Tadeusz Rolke. 

During the Fluxus group tour of Eastern Europe in 1966, members of this American experimental group performed in the Museum of Czech Literature in Strahov monastery in Prague. The 1960s was witnessing a relative liberalization in cultural life in Czechoslovakia. At that time, information about international art, including Fluxus works, was accessible in Czech journals. There were also personal contacts between Czech artists (e.g. Jindřich Chalupecký, Milan Knížák, Jiří Kolář) and Fluxus. The performance in the Museum of Czech Literature was introduced by the Czech art critic and main organizer of this happening Jindřich Chalupecký. Mainly pieces by Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles were featured. Although it was an important event for Czech artists, enabling them to see what contemporary forms of action art looked like, the Czech audience did not really appreciate the performance.

Ernst Museum, Budapest, 16 April - 8 May 1966

One of the determining agents in the organization and history of the Studio of Young Artists was the board and the views represented by its members. After the election in 1964, artistic freedom and the integration of different tendencies became a priority. The board established a theoretic panel (for cultural-political reasons, the collaboration of artists and art historians earlier had not been nurtured or supported), and it encouraged members to be freer in their expressive experiments.

Negotiating with the ministry (and personally with the main cultural political decision-maker, György Aczél) the chairperson, István Bencsik, received permission to hold a “jury-free” exhibition (which meant that only board members would select the works due to spatial limitations). This “yearly exhibition” was the first to display non-figurative works, which were on exhibition in a separate room (with a surrealist and a pop-section as well).

In 1967, his widow Elena (Jurašaitytė) and Meilė Lukšienė gave the first part of Janulaitis' documents to the Manuscript Department of the Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences (from 2009, the Wróblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences). Lukšienė sorted and described the documents. The work was finally completed in 1985, but was not accessible to the public.