The first books with reproductions of art, I saw in the fifth, sixth grade. The teacher pulled out some big books from the bottom of the closet there in the classroom. They were all in, from Renaissance, that period, somewhere there, I remember and they were all in black and white, no color. But they left me a great impression that, on very, on very bad paper, very badly reproduced, in black and white, but there was still strength and mystery and, and something there that you, that came through despite all that bad paper, bad ink, bad, no color. And later, many years later, I saw originals, some of them, and the originals did not impress me that much more than when I saw them in those miserable reproductions when I was 14, 15 years old. And that's the, one of the, you know, argument, arguments is, you know, argument that one could... it's a subject that when we talk about original film or film or the same film on video you see, to me, that no matter how you, if something is really good then you cannot destroy it, no matter what you do to it, it's still something comes through. Not all of it, but there is some aspect that is still is, remains there and comes in a factual and it does something to you.
[Q] When you say they were basic illustrations of renaissance paintings?
Yes, some reproductions, I do remember the Durer, those I can see, and I don't exactly remember now but some of them, more known of course Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo, you know, that's what they showed to schools.
[Q] And then?
And then we jumped from those reproductions because there was nothing that you could see in Lithuania, only, after the war already in Wiesbaden, when the American army collected some of the plundered stolen works and the... from the... Europe's museums that Germany, German, Hitler's Nazi Germany had done and they exhibited them in '47 in Wiesbaden in a huge, huge space that you could see a lot of original, original art from all of the periods where, for the first time, I could see some of the originals.
