Nineteen year old Romas Kalanta, who immolated himself in Kaunas City Garden park on 14 May 1972, left a brief note in his notebook: 'Only the regime is to blame for my death.' Thirty years later, the place of his death was marked by a monument, Field of Sacrifice, created by Robertas Antinis Jr., which has since become a symbol of ideological fracturing and the growing thirst for freedom of the last decades of the Soviet period.

Beginning in the 1960s, in the background of Brezhnevian stagnation, which took deep economic and political roots in social life, artistic processes expanded the vocabulary of irony:  Aesopian language and the grotesque; adding a critical perspective on boring daily life - otherwise speckled with Soviet slogans.
In the early 1970s, a foursome began between Kostas Dereškevičius, Algimantas Jonas Kuras, Algimantas Švėgžda and Arvydas Šaltenis. The group made a statement about creating an art of open critical realism without any embellishments of reality. They shattered the canon of modernist art and were nurtured by the generation of the Thaw period's taste for a tinge of humour, irony and frivolity. The artists who started the so-called deromanticising tradition were soon joined by their more radical colleagues: painters Mindaugas Skudutis, Henrikas Natalevičius, Bronius Gražys, Raimundas Sližys, Romanas Vilkauskas, Šarūnas Sauka, printmakers Nijolė Valadkevičiūtė, Elvyra Kairiūkštytė, Mikalojus Povilas Vilutis and others. Art was enriched with new motifs and creative strategies - the disassembling of everyday life and the carnavalisation of meanings came to symbolise a resistance to the absurdity of the Soviet regime.

Along with active criticism, there was a noticeable trend to pursue substantial meaning and embrace the existential ennui - as most distinctly expressed in photographs from the 1980s. Works by Vitas Luckus, Virgilijus Šonta, Alfonsas Budvytis, Remigijus Pačėsa and other photographic artists show an individual in a state of outer and inner crisis: imprisoned in a system on its last legs, wherein inner resistance and sometimes humour become the only possible forms of rebellion. Existential angst and severe distress strain the back of a figure represented by sculptor Ksenija Jaroševaitė, while the spikes of Gediminas Karalius' Spoon convey pain. Paintings by Algimantas Švėgžda, Linas Leonas Katinas, Vygantas Paukštė, Algis Skačkauskas, Audronė Petrašiūnaitė, Rūta Viktorija Katiliūtė and others are marked with pensiveness.

This inner resistance grew in proportion to the flow of information from the West: the culture of rock music, the samizdat press; and through participation in informal gatherings, which contributed to the appearance and expression of artistic ideas and formed a common worldview. Communication among artists is reflected in the collective drawings of Antanas Martinaitis, Ričardas Povilas Vaitiekūnas, Edmundas Saladžius, and Linas Leonas Katinas's canvas, which bears the signatures of the guests who visited his studio.

The sumptuous funeral ceremony of Leonid Brezhnev, a symbol of stagnation, seen in 'Film Notes' by Algimantas Kunčius, stands in contrast to the joyful gathering of intellectuals in the flat of the leading painter Antanas Gudaitis - as if presaging the collapse of the regime and an approaching new era.