Vilnius City Municipality
Vilnius
artist museum and Vilnius Jewish memory exhibition
Naugarduko g. 10, Vilnius
54.67720, 25.27710
1-1.5 hours; longer with a guide or when combining with other museum branches
a quieter weekday afternoon, when the exhibition can be read slowly
Samuel Bak Museum
The first museum in the world dedicated to Samuel Bak
The Samuel Bak Museum is a branch of the Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History at Naugarduko g. 10. It opened on November 17, 2017 and is regarded as the first museum in the world dedicated solely to this artist's work. For the opening, Samuel Bak donated 54 of his works to Lithuania and the museum, and he was granted the regalia of an honorary citizen of Vilnius.
This is an intimate place where one artist's biography becomes a story of Vilnius, the ghetto, displacement, survival, and memory. Samuel Bak was born in Vilnius in 1933 and held his first exhibition of drawings at the age of nine. His earliest surviving works were created in the Vilnius Ghetto in 1942-1943, when childhood, talent, and catastrophe occupied the same fragile space. The museum therefore requires historical attention; it is not only an art gallery.
37 works selected by Bak himself
The official museum exhibition emphasizes that it shows a group of 37 works selected by Samuel Bak himself. That fact matters: the exhibition is not a random retrospective slice but the artist's own way of looking back at his work and life themes.
The works connect early Vilnius experience with later canvases in which broken objects, cities, symbols, childhood, and biblical imagination recur. In Bak's painting, memory often speaks through an object, a fragment, and metaphor.
Ghetto drawings and the Pinkas
Bak's early drawings are especially important because they were made on blank pages of the Vilnius Jewish community register known as the Pinkas. This is more than an artistic detail: the material itself records the meeting point between a community document and a child's survival story.
During a visit, do not rush past the biographical texts. They help explain why Bak's works are not simply Holocaust illustrations, but a long, multilayered language about loss, guilt, remembering, and the imagination's effort to face an impossible experience.
From the ghetto to a global artist
Bak's life path explains why his art became so universal. After miraculously surviving Nazi occupation, he lived in a displaced persons camp in Germany, later in Israel and Western Europe, and in 1993 settled in the United States, where he continued creating into the twenty-first century with large-format canvases. The museum exhibition connects these stages into one narrative of memory.
The Samuel Bak Museum is inevitably tied to the history of the Vilnius Ghetto, but it should not be reduced to a Holocaust museum. Its main axis is the artist's work, where historical trauma becomes a complex visual language. The museum therefore suits both art visitors and people interested in Vilnius Jewish history.
Hours and tickets
At the time of review, the official Vilna Gaon Museum listed the Samuel Bak Museum hours as closed on Mondays, open Tuesday-Friday 10:00-18:00, Saturday-Sunday 11:00-18:00, with last admission 30 minutes before closing.
At the time of review, an adult ticket cost 6 EUR, a discounted ticket 3 EUR, and a family ticket 10 EUR; the last Sunday of the month was listed as a free admission day under museum rules. Check the official page before travelling.
