Jānis Kalmīte

Who was Jānis Kalmīte?

Jānis Kalmīte was an expressionist painter and among the best-known artists in the Latvian post-World War II diaspora community. His name is associated with the development of a singular theme – the rija. Rijas, or threshing barns, were historically among the oldest structures on the traditional Latvian homestead. Throughout his half-century of exile from Latvia, Kalmīte transformed the rija into an artistic symbol for the persistence of Latvian ethnic culture in the face of invasion and occupation by foreign powers.

Coming of age during the first period of Latvia’s independence between the two World Wars, Kalmīte studied in the figural master studio of Ģederts Eliass at the Latvian Academy of Art, from which he graduated in 1935. He joined the artists’ society Mūksalieši, whose stated mission was to develop a Latvian national art, following in the footsteps of artists such as Ādams Alksnis and Teodors Ūders. Kalmīte left Latvia with his wife Alīda and infant daughter Guna, as political refugees in 1944, when Latvia was invaded by the Soviet Union. He spent six years as a displaced person in Germany and then immigrated to America at age forty-three.