Aniela Pawlikowska

Aniela Pawlikowska, known as Lela Pawlikowska (11 July 1901 - 23 December 1980), was a Polish artist, illustrator and society portrait painter. She came to prominence in the United Kingdom in the 1950s and '60s.

Life

Aniela Pawlikowska was born to a family with a rich literary and scientific heritage. 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. Her father was , engineer, inventor, author on mathematical logic, linguist, an early pioneer of the Polish petroleum industry, and associate of the Canadian petroleum entrepreneur, William Henry McGarvey.

Aniela was the youngest of five children. Her older sister was the writer and poet, Beata Obertyńska.

Aniela was home-schooled. One of her tutors was a family friend, the university professor of philosophy and psychology and artist, Władysław Witwicki. Aniela ("Lela") Wolska's artistic talent was noted early; she held her first solo exhibition at age nine. 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 as an auditor.

In 1923 Lela Wolska married , a bibliophile, writer, and publisher. She joined him at the family seat of Medyka, near Przemyśl. "Medyka" was also the imprint her husband's small publishing and printing enterprise which specialised in small runs of literary works for which Lela provided the illustrations. They had three daughters and a son. The family would also spend a lot of time at their mountain chalet, "Pod Jedlami" ("The Firs"), in Zakopane. It had been designed for Michał's father, , by the modernist artist, Stanisław Witkiewicz. With her husband's active support she continued her studies in art at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts with Wojciech Weiss and Kazimierz Sichulski.

In the 1930s she exhibited widely in Lwów, Kraków, Warsaw and Zakopane and abroad in Leipzig, Rome, Florence and Turin. With the outbreak of World War II she took her four small children to Lwów where she went to live with her sister in the Wolski villa, known as "Zaświecie". In May 1940 already after the first wave of Soviet deportations of Poles to Siberia, she managed to get a laissez-passer for herself and the children into the Nazi General Government. They were taken in by a relative, the political activist and poet , on her estate in Goszyce. In April 1942, thanks to her husband's intervention, she was able to travel to Italy to join him in Rome. She continued to work virtually to the end of her life, despite losing the sight in one eye.

Fate of Medyka 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. A similar intention lies behind the style of the coloured linocut of "St. Hubertus" of 1936.