Museum of Applied Arts and Design of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, Vilnius [Lietuvos nacionalinis dailės muziejus]

In the 1970s and 80s, the designer Feliksas Daukantas (1915–95), who is considered the pioneer of Lithuanian design education created a series of jewellery pieces from organic glass. This synthetic material allowed him to convey the spirit of the industrial era in minimalist terms. In some of the pieces, glass was combined with amber, which is particularly valued in Lithuanian culture, thus bringing together innovation and tradition as well as the artificial and the natural.
Daukantas gifted his jewellery to not only his relatives, but also his colleagues at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, where he had founded the Design Department in 1961. As unique specimens, his jewellery pieces fit well into the collections of the Museum of Applied Arts and Design (part of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art), where many objects are one-of-a-kind or limited-edition design creations. However, they have an exceptional place in the collection due to their modern approach: by using materials common in construction and household products, the artist has broken with the decorative traditions characterizing jewellery of the past.
Gražina Gurnevičiūtė, Živilė Intaitė