2024-08-01

The House of Creativity in Palanga: A Structured Utopia (Summary)

Laima Laučkaitė (PDF)
https://doi.org/10.53631/DIS/2017.8.6

The article analyses a Soviet artists’ colony, the House of Creativity in Palanga, established in 1950 in the Baltic seaside resort. Artists’ residences, called artists’ houses of creativity and recreation, sprouted up after World War II in the Soviet Union. There were several of them in different republics: Senezh near Moscow, Jurmala (Latvia), Gurzuf (Crimea), Khosta (Krasnodar Krai) and Palanga (Lithuania). The creativity houses belonged to the Artists’ Union of the USSR and were funded by the Art Foundation of the USSR, located in Moscow. The article covers the history of the Artists’ House of Creativity in Palanga, its establishment, location, functioning, funding, the procedure for forming creative groups, the selection principles and artistic production. The Artists’ Creativity House in Palanga was part of the institutional and economic environment of Soviet art, which transformed the utopia of the artists’ colony into an ideological and bureaucratic structure.

Keywords: artists’ colony, artists’ residence, artists’ union, Soviet Lithuanian art