Marija Rima Tūbelaitė

Marija was born November 2, 1923, in Kaunas, Lithuania to Juozas Tūbelis and Jadvyga Tūbelienė into arguably the most respected, powerful and well-connected family in interwar Lithuania.

• Her mother, Jadvyga Tūbelienė, was one of the founders of the Lithuanian Council of Women, a writer, diplomat and sat on the board of many charities.
• Her father, Juozas Tūbelis, was the long-standing Prime Minister of Lithuania and former Finance Minister.
• One aunt, Sofija Smetonienė, was First Lady of Lithuania and an active player in the woman's movement.
• Another aunt, Gabrielė Petkevičiatė-Bitė, was an active worker in social rights and one of the foremost writers in the country.
• One uncle was Antanas Smetona, the first, sitting and long-standing President of Lithuania.
• Another uncle, Romanas Chodakauskas, was former military attaché to Germany and a Colonel in the Lithuanian Military Court.
• A third uncle, Tadas Chodakauskas , was the mayor of Panevėžys , the fifth-largest city in Lithuania .

She was also connected to many other influential people through her family. Two of her best friends, for example, Laimutė and Algirdas, were the children of Colonel Juozas Šarauskas, chief scout of the Lithuanian Scout Union.

Marija's mother was also friends with the painter Justinas Vienožinskis, art critic and museologist Paulius Galaunė and his wife, singer Adele Nezabitauskaitė, watercolor painter Kajetonas Sklėrius and his wife Helene Freybusch, and the artist and scenographer Mstislavas Dobužinskis.[1] Jadvyga also knew Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis from their days in Vilnius.[2] Art surrounded Marija from an early age.

As Marija had a disability due to a difficult birth, she was home schooled. Her mother invited Petras Kalpokas to give Marija private drawing lessons.[3]

Petras Kalpokas' lessons stuck in Marija's memory for a long time:[4]

My first encounter with painting occurred when I was in the third grade of elementary school. That winter, my mother, who had dreamed of becoming an artist in her youth, invited painter Petras Kalpokas to give my friend Danute Narutavičiūtė and me drawing lessons. As far as I can remember, he came to the apartment in our Pieno Centro house every week. We painted exclusively watercolours and still lifes, in which at least one onion was always featured among potatoes, carrots, beets and cucumbers. To keep us from getting bored, our teacher, who, by the way, was usually a little annoyed, entertained us with his stories about Sancho Pancho and Dulsina. Listening to these "spicy" episodes that were not quite suitable for nine-year-old girls, Danute and I just fell from their chairs with laughter. When I had to read Don Quixote in high school a few years later, I was very disappointed not to find the most juicy situations Petras Kalpokas had told us about.[5]

According to Marija, when Kalpokas left, he gallantly kissed her mother's hand and she told him:

I always knew that you were a good artist, but that you are such a great teacher is new! When you leave us, Marytė just can't wait for your next lesson - really, she just can't wait for it.[6]

When she was ten years old, Marija's parents built a house, designed by architect Feliksas Vizbaras, on the uppermost terrace of the Žaliakalnis hillside near Kaukas Lane, at 1 Dainavos gatvė, Kaunas: the Tūbelis house (now Kaunas Art Gymnasium).[7]

Marija's father, Juozas Tūbelis died on September 30, 1939.

On June 18, 1940 Marija and her mother fled Lithuania, just ahead of the Soviet occupation.

One evening, at our house at the very end of Dainavos Street, a crowd of rough-looking people gathered outside the gates. It was very late - I knew it was late because the days are so long in June - and I had a hard time seeing them. They yelled terrible things at us and cursed us and I was in such shock and almost fainted. So my mother decided that perhaps it would be good to leave, even for a short time. We drove away with incredible sadness, because it meant that Lithuania was dead. We didn’t think that death would later involve so many deportations and killings. We left on the eighteenth, three days after the Russians had marched into Lithuania. My uncle, Antanas Smetona, left on the fifteenth.

Departing from Lithuania, the family was in close contact with Marija's aunt, Sofia Smetonienė and uncle President Antanas Smetona.

They went to stay with the Smetonas at the Hunters' Heights (Gästeheim Jägerhöhe) at the Schwenzait resort in the Masurian Lakes area of Poland. They were there for the summer of 1940.

Marija and her mother then went to Berlin from where they flew to Madrid (via Frankfurt am Main, Lyon and Barcelona)  and then took a train to Lisbon.

They spent several months in Lisbon waiting for a ship to the United States. In December 1940, they departed Lisbon bound for Argentina.

From Argentina, they sailed to New York City, USA in December, 1940.

On March 10, 1941, Marija and her mother welcomed Antanas Smetona and his wife Sofija to the USA. A few days later, on March 13, Marija attended the reception of Smetona's arrival in the United States at The Pierre Hotel in New York. She and her mother sat in seats reserved for the most distinguished guests.

In September, 1941, Marija and her mother lived in Cleveland.

Marija started university in 1941 attending the College of Wooster in Ohio. Later she received a Lithuanian scholarship to study art at the University of Chicago in 1943.[8]

She earned a Bachelor's degree in art history and in 1945, a Master of Arts in history.[8]

The building of the Art Students League at 215 West 57th Street

Her mother encouraged her not only to study art, but to start painting too. Marija studied at the Art Students League of New York.[8] Marija later told her son that if she had not been encouraged by her mother, she might not have discovered this talent at all.[9]

At a foreign students’ mixer at Columbia University, Marija met Kurt Kuhlmann, a graduate student at the university.[10]

In 1948 Marija and Kurt married and they had one child, Peter Kuhlmann, born in New York.[10]

On May 2, 1950 the US Congress granted Marija and her mother US citizenship on an exceptional basis.

Married and a mother, Marija pushed painting aside for a while. However, in 1955, Marija tried to return to work again.

Marija's painting was encouraged by friends, first of all Danutė Jasaitytė.

Adomas Galdikas

Danutė was a childhood friend who had married the son of the French avant-garde artist Francis Picabia. Danutė lived in the New York suburb of Flushing and when she met Marija, she encouraged her to paint. Danutė promised to bring the artist Adomas Galdikas, who had emigrated to America, to review her paintings.

She informed her mother about her impending meeting with Galdikas. Jadvyga Tūbelienė's responded:

Why do you think he will definitely encourage you? I have known Galdikas since the time of Petrograd and he can sometimes be upright and sharp. If he tells you that your painting doesn't suit anyone, your already very faltering self-confidence will finally and forever fall apart.[11]

However, Marija decided not to listen to her mother's warning. To Marija's surprise, the meeting with Galdikas and the review of the paintings went completely differently than Jadvyga Tūbelienė had predicted. Galdikas liked the still imperfect pictures of Marija. Especially her flowers. He told her:

"Landscapes like these can be painted by others, but flowers like these are very rare. This is already very, very rare. There was such straightforwardness, such simplicity, they repeated." Then he took off his thick glasses, pulled me by the hand, and exclaimed, "What a miracle that Juozas Tūbelis' daughter began painting!"[11]

Thanks to Adomas Galdikas, Marija was determined to resume painting.

In 1957, Marija and her family moved from New York to Portland, Oregon. Marija set up a painting studio at home.[12]

In order to make some money from her work, Marija started painting portraits. In her autobiography, she noted:

In Portland, I started receiving orders from the very beginning for portraits. Because I always had good luck with portraits of little girls and teens, and because in those days there was a big fashion in America to load up on piles of children, I received more orders than I could cover. However, I almost immediately became convinced that the principle of "paint as God gave" was not very suitable in portrait studies. So I immediately went out to study with one well-known local portraitist and really learned a lot from her.[11]

The first period of Marija's work in Portland, which lasted for a decade (1957–1967), was very intense. The diverse and stunning landscape of the vast state of Oregon, with its tall dark spruces and cone-shaped mountains, was simply amazing to paint. At that time, Marija also painted many portraits of children.

The successful creative period was crowned in 1963, when she hosted a solo exhibition of her work at the University of Portland.[12] At the same time, several of her still lifes with flowers were included in group exhibitions at the Portland Museum of Art. In 1965 an exhibition of her paintings was held at the town hall in St. Helens, Oregon.[13]

In 1968 the family moved to Taiwan, as Marija's husband, Kurt Kuhlmann, being an engineer, worked on various projects around the world.

Eastern culture and art made a huge impact on Marija's work. She wrote:

My first impression in Taiwan was, to put it mildly, traumatic. After a quiet, well-organized environment in Oregon, Chinese life seemed to be engulfed in complete chaos: a lot of people, confusion, and everything so small, so fragile, miniature. It looked like you were looking through the other side of the binoculars. Of course, Chinese painting at the Palace Museum in Taipei was magnificent. I said to myself, “Enjoy it, but don’t be influenced by it,” as I admired the subtle and poetic scrolls of the Song dynasty (960–1127). “No, no, no.” Everyone who has been here will agree that Chinese art and primitivism are unrelated. But since I could not remain indifferent to the beauty and elegance of Chinese painting, in the end I gave up. My palette became brighter and brighter, my strokes more subtle, I made the outlines of objects less dark and expressive. And because oil paints seemed too rough to convey details of the Chinese landscape, I started painting with acrylic paints.[14]

In 1970, Marija held a personal exhibition at The Magic Touch Gallery in Taipei, Taiwan. She later participated in several group exhibitions in this gallery.

Between 1971 and 1979, the family lived in Kobe, Japan.

Marija began collaborating with Osaka's Katzura Gallery, and from 1974 to 1978 she held exhibitions at art galleries in Kyoto, Wakayama, Hiroshima, Osaka and Nagoya. Marija's paintings have also been exhibited at the American Club in Tokyo and the Kobe Club.[15]

Besides being a Lithuanian artists, Marija was also a Lithuanian patriot. In Kobe, there was a Russian consulate. Marija, being fiercely pro-Lithuanian, was therefore anti-Russian. Her husband had quite an important position with the French chemical company L'Air Liquide, and the family were respected members of the foreign community. The foreign community in Kobe at that time was very social and there was a lot of entertainment, cocktail parties, dinners and celebrations of various countries’ important days. At these diplomatic receptions, the Russian consul would often be present. He was terrified of Marija and always tried to stay on the opposite side of the room from her because she would confront him with the blatant lies and propaganda his government made.

She also wrote letters to the editors of the English language newspapers in Japan condemning the Soviet occupation of the Baltics, and challenging certain articles that had a pro-Soviet slant.

In 1978 the German Cultural Centre in Taiwan organized an exhibition of Marija's paintings. In 1978 she selected 60 of her best paintings and sent them to the United States.[15]

After Japan, the family moved back to Taiwan.

Several solo exhibitions were held at the American Club Taipei (1980, 1982, 1984).[15] Exhibitions were held in Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Chicago.[16]

In 1984 Marija and her family returned to the United States and settled in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida,[16] where there was a large Lithuanian community. Marija had many friends there from her days of childhood in Lithuania.

In 1987 Marija's held a solo exhibit at the Lithuanian Club in St. Petersburg.[16]

In 1988 she joined the Sun Tan Gallery, a group of Florida artists, and exhibited several new works each year.[17]

After Lithuania regained  its independence, in 1991, Marija revisited Lithuania.

In 1992 she was granted Lithuanian citizenship and in 1995 Marija bought an apartment in Vilnius and spent three months there every year. She also became a member of the Lithuanian Artists 'Union and the Lithuanian Writers' Union.[18]

Marija died on May 3, 2014 in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida.[19]

A memorial service was held for her on October 15, 2014 in the Kaunas Cathedral Basilica. She was buried, beside her father, Juozas Tūbelis, in Panemunės Cemetery, Kaunas.