After WWI, when Vilnius became a part of Poland, Kaunas became the temporary capital of the first Republic of Lithuania (1918-1939). And from 1920 started to develop an art school, first providing drawing classes, then 1922 forming as an academy called the Kaunas School of Art, whose first class graduated in 1926.
The school's faculty consisted of members of the national cultural revival of the early-20th century: Petras Kalpokas, Kajetonas Sklėrius, Jonas Šileika, Adomas Varnas, Juozas Zikaras and others. Due to the uneven level of the teachers' qualifications, the study programme lacked consistency and received a fair amount of criticism from its students, and working artists. In an attempt to synchronise it with Europe's system of art education, the programme was modified a number of times, increasing the focus on applied disciplines. In the 1930s, decorative painting and sculpture, woodcarving and ceramics were added to the usual "academic" forms of visual art. A substantial reform was carried out in 1939, when the School was awarded the status of a high education institution, and separate curricula of visual and applied arts were finally formed.
The faculty members who enjoyed the greatest admiration among the school's students were Justinas Vienožinskis, former head of the drawing courses and the first principal of the school, and Adomas Galdikas, head of the graphics studio. Both teachers, who emphasised the visual specifics of art, imparted anti-naturalist artistic views to their students. And they encouraged their students to take interest in Lithuanian folk art and adopt its forms of expression. Vienožinskis' method was based on the concept of a painting as a synthetic structure of colours and shapes, which was characteristic of postimpressionism. Galdikas earned the students' appreciation for his graphic works and paintings which balanced an expressive stroke with Art Deco aesthetics. Beside these two teachers, the internationally renowned artist Mstislavas Dobužinskis played a brief yet significant role. Having come to Lithuania from Paris in 1929, he lectured at the School for a while, promoting the ideas of industrial art and the then-popular current of machinism, which consisted of industrial motifs and the constructivist aesthetic of Art Deco. The general course of studies was fairly moderate, free of both strict academic rules and methods that would encourage free experimentation. Most of the faculty members were painters who had studied in reformed art academies at the turn of the century and had not received a consistent "classical" education. In both their artistic and teaching work, they followed the principles of the so-called "painterly realism", blended with elements of impressionism, postimpressionism and other newer currents. These artists favoured the genres of portraiture and landscape, implanting this preference in the student body's aesthetic views as well. Typically, landscape became the national genre thereafter.
Landscape's exceptional popularity among the students was conditioned by more factors. This predilection was also associated with their peasant roots, which prompted young painters to turn back to nature and portray the native rural environment. Though the School's teaching was even more influential upon the concrete methods and subjective imagination of the artists. The School's students often considered the portrait genre to be excessively demanding, the still life genre overly material and formalistic, and the historical or mythological composition too conservative. Meanwhile, the landscape was both an easily accessible "model" that allowed them to use the fragments of the real world, and a convenient way of expressing a state of mind. Without cutting oneself adrift from reality, the landscape painter could free-associate and paint in mood and colour, and visual verisimilitude, to impose a psychical reading on the landscape.
The development of Lithuanian art of the 20th century as a national school in the broad sense was unhampered by normative stylistic and genre standards. The set of its aesthetic criteria that took shape in the inter-bellum period was liberal and favourable to the artists' individual emotional expression.