Aniela Pawlikowska
Her mother was Maryla Wolska, a Polish poet, the daughter of Wanda Młodnicka, née Monné, muse and fiancée of the painter Artur Grottger, herself a writer and translator.
On that occasion, 54 of her works were exhibited by the Lwów Society of Friends of Fine Art (Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych).
Her home education did not conclude with a matriculation examination, so she attended lectures on the history of art given at Lwów University by Professors Bołoz-Antoniewicz and Władysław Podlacha [pl] as an auditor.
By the end of 1946 the family had moved to London to join the thousands of demobilised allied Polish military personnel who were allowed to settle in the United Kingdom, now that their homeland had been given over to Soviet Ukraine as part of the Yalta Accord.
[1] In 1955 her popularity led to a solo exhibition at London's Parsons Gallery which was deemed one of the cultural events of the year, not least among the Polish emigrant community.
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] Given Pawlikowska's creativity may be defined by her highly traditional and conservative background, undoubtedly influenced by her husband's, patriotic and nationalistic views, as the main champion of her work, at a time of deep crisis for the nation coupled with exile in the Free World, she did not seek to join the Avant-garde but sought instead in her own words, to "make links between the basic elements of art and means of expression with her Polishness".
[3] 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.
Notable were her gouache colour and black and white linocut illustrations for Zofia Kossak-Szczucka's God's Madman - Szaleńcy Boży (Kraków 1929).
Her portfolio of ten linocuts, Bogurodzica (Mother of God), overlain with watercolours and gilded are a reference to folk woodcarvings and paintings on glass.
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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
