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Kalpokas, Petras
(b nr Rokiskis, 12 April 1880; d Kaunas, 6 Dec 1945). Lithuanian painter. He studied first in Mitava (now Jelgava) under Janis Valters and Vilhelms Purvitis, and then in Riga. In Munich he studied at the Anton Azbe school (1905–8) and attended classes in the decorative and applied arts, drawing and history of art, while at the same time exhibiting with the Munich Secession. Catalogues show that his first works after his return to Lithuania were influenced by the Symbolist movement in Munich, for example the Fiery Horseman (1912). In 1914 Kalpokas went to Switzerland, where he prepared for an exhibition that was to take place in Germany, but at the onset of World War I 120 of his works were lost. He then lived in poverty in Italy, working as a retoucher near Genoa. A painting from this period, Italian Fisherman (1919; Vilnius, priv. col.), reveals the influence of the Italian Renaissance and a desire to emulate the classical style of the 1830s. In 1921 Kalpokas returned to Lithuania but was untouched by the phase of National Romanticism in contemporary Baltic art. Instead he painted landscapes with echoes of Art Nouveau, as in Autumn (1921; Kaunas, Ciurlionis A. Mus.). He produced portraits and executed wall paintings in the spirit of Hans von Marées’s German ‘idealism’ (e.g. 1937–8; Vilnius, Lith. Cent. Trade & Indust.; destr. 1943). During the 1920s he became engaged in teaching activities in Kaunas, and from 1940 he taught at the State Institute of Applied and Decorative Art there.
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