COURAGE

connecting collections

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.

The collection starts with the foundation of the Smoloskyp human rights publishing house, named after the poet Vasyl Symonenko. It was originally founded in Baltimore, US, in 1967. As one of the biggest publishers of Ukrainian dissident literature, it holds the largest collection of Ukrainian samizdat (Ukr. samvydav) and the material of the Ukrainian resistance movement (Rukh Oporu), 1960-1990. The phenomenon of Smoloskyp, however, goes far beyond the scope of a publishing house. Smoloskyp is associated with the hub of human rights activities of the Ukrainian diaspora. Smoloskyp took an active part in the campaigns for human rights in Ukraine, and (co)founded several human rights organizations: Smoloskyp Organization for the Defence of Human Rights in Ukraine, Washington Helsinki Guarantees for Ukraine Committee, and the Committee for the Defence of Ukrainian Political Prisoners in the USSR. Smoloskyp activists took part in follow-up meetings to the Helsinki Final Act (1975), held by the OSCE in Belgrade in 1977–78, Madrid in 1980–83, and Vienna in 1986–89. They participated at the International Sakharov Hearing and spoke at the US Congress. Smoloskyp organized a series of protest campaigns against political repression in Soviet Ukraine, and fought for the independent participation of Ukraine in the Olympic games. It ran information services in the US, Canada, and Argentina, widely disseminating factual information on political repression and the dissident movement in Ukraine. It cooperated with international human rights organizations (such as Amnesty International) and sent humanitarian aid to Ukrainian political prisoners. Its secret communication channels along with its own network of specially trained couriers allowed Smoloskyp to establish a two-way traffic of censored information and clandestine materials across the Iron curtain.