Aniela Pawlikowska

After the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, the village of Medyka, and therefore the Pawlikowski estate, found themselves annexed by the Soviet Union. With 1948 border adjustments between the new Polish People's Republic and its neighbour, Medyka found itself once again just over the Polish side of the new border. The Pawlikowski estate became state property and was turned into a State Agricultural Farm (PGR). In the 1960s it was decided to demolish the palace on the grounds that it was a vestige of the earlier "bourgeois hegemony". Fortunately, the family had taken the precaution at the outbreak of war to donate part of its valuable collections to the Ossolineum in Lwów and to take other parts to their chalet in Zakopane. The gamble paid off, as most of the archive managed to survive in scattered form. Pawlikowska and the family never returned to Medyka after the war to see the devastation of the place where they had spent the happiest time of their lives. It was a fate shared by the totality of Polish landowners in the Kresy region of Poland and marked a "caesura" in history and the obliteration not only of a way of life, but also of a centuries-old hugely rich and diverse cultural heritage centred on the city of Lwów.[1]

Her public debut, aside from the Juvenilia, were illustrations and graphic designs for a first library edition of her husband's work, Agnieszka albo o Pannie na niedźwiedziu, "Agnes or the Maiden atop the Bear", (Medyka 1925). It was a pastiche on a medieval Incunable, particularly on the Balthasar Behem Codex, well known to her and which inaugurated the publishing venture of the Medyka Library series which until it ceased in 1939, went on to produce 15 richly illustrated titles, generally the work of Pawlikowska. Among her significant contributions were two volumes by Beata Obesityńska, A Guitare and others - Gitara i tamci (Medyka 1926) and The tale of Brothers Frost. A Calendar dream - O Braciach Mroźnych. Sen kalendarzowy (Medyka 1930). Notable were her gouache colour and black and white linocut illustrations for Zofia Kossak-Szczucka's God's Madman - Szaleńcy Boży (Kraków 1929). In London Pawlikowska illustrated over a dozen titles for Veritas, a Polish religious publishing foundation.[3]

Sacred topics were central to Pawlikowska's creativity, especially of Marian inspiration. Her portfolio of ten linocuts, Bogurodzica (Mother of God), overlain with watercolours and gilded are a reference to folk woodcarvings and paintings on glass. They were published by Medyka in 1930. Commenting on this art déco series, and other single works after the war, Pawlikowska said: "those pictures are on a religious theme, but my aim was to express them in Polish, not drawing on any pattern or style, rather perhaps relying on folk art (...) the point was to reflect the world through the Marian calendar and traditions, for example, Our Lady of Sowing, Our Lady of Berries, Our Lady of Herbs... and also to convey it by the simplest artistic means through line and thereby to confer as much expression as possible".[lower-alpha 1] A similar intention lies behind the style of the coloured linocut of "St. Hubertus" of 1936.[3]

The period after the war saw the creation of several important religious works by Pawlikowska. Among them are the 1947 depiction of "Saint Stanisław Szczepanowski, bishop and martyr" for the altar of the Marian Fathers' chapel at Fawley Court in Buckinghamshire England, and two paintings whose fate is unknown, one from 1947 the other dated 1962. There are reproductions of "Prayer for the souls in purgatory" (1947) and "Father Maksymilian Kolbe" (1962). Throughout her career, she designed many Christmas and Easter cards.[3]

Pawlikowska devoted her entire life to the study of the human form and to nature. Her sketchbooks were filled with human figures, plants and animals as part of her uninterrupted daily atelier. She was an amateur botanist and an acute observer. Her landscapes, chiefly in watercolour, were initially a throwback to the 19th-century. Later they clearly referred to a growing fascination with Japanese painting and colour experimentation of the Interwar period. A separate chapter in her creative work were the studies of interiors - mainly of the palace in Medyka. After the war, knowing she could never return to her home, she immortalised those interiors from memory substituting artistic style for the eroded detail.[3]

Her portraiture that was to become the mainstay of émigré family life and support for the chalet in Poland, oscillated initially between a style redolent of secessionism and new experiments with colour and form. However, the pressures of wartime and the difficult period in Italy of necessity turned much of her artwork into a commissioned commodity. It gained popularity in high society, but at the price of a reversion into traditional academic art.[3]

From her émigré years, only a handful of works survive that were untainted by the loss of hope of ever returning to her homeland or by the increasing rigour of having to earn her living. Among them are three still lives and a painting of roses. They are outstanding works torn out of the daily drudgery and mark the artist's farewell to creative freedom. As though painted in haste in meaty oils is the painting "Roses", then in disharmonious colour comes the grotesque "Pinocchio and the doll" (circa 1943), "Black pudding on straw" (1960), and finally, "clay pots" (1970) were the last expressions of the artist's soul.[3] Of her commissions in England, a certain "relic" remains in the form of a pastel drawing of the infant head of the future Diana, Princess of Wales.[5]