After World War I, abstract painting, which was initiated in the late 19th century by Swedish painter Hilma af Klint, gradually gained a dominant position and became a universal artistic ideology in Europe. It is a powerful artistic movement that goes far beyond visual or plastic imagery and demonstrates the ability to create aesthetic and philosophical systems and solve social problems. The early 1930s saw the emergence of several groups of abstract art, mainly in France, such as Concrete Art (1930), Circle and Square (1930), Abstraction and Creativity (1931), which united artists of different nationalities and backgrounds. During World War II (1939-1945), a school of so-called abstract expressionism emerged in the United States, represented by Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Mark Tobey (1890–1976), and others. Later in the 1950s, the movement was joined by women artists Elaine de Kooning (1918-1989), Grace Hartigan (1922-2008), Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), and Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011). In Lithuania, abstract art found it difficult to make its way because during the Soviet regime such art was considered ideologically inappropriate. Even so, this is the direction artist Kazimiera Zimblytė chose for herself.
Zimblytė made a mark in Lithuanian art not only as a creator who developed one of the most radical branches of abstract material painting in the 1970s, but also as a case study of an artist of the Soviet occupation era whose work had no place in the regime and earned Zimblytė the label of a “sad and misunderstood artist”.