The son of the Russian Jan Titkow and Franciszka Rokoss, who herself was the granddaughter of Jan Augustyn Stolle, was educated in Wilno [present-day Vilnius] from 1931-1934, where he received a diploma in ‘workshop movement technique’. His choice of occupation was no accident – by tradition, relatives of the owners of Niemen Glassworks held certain positions in the factory’s organisational structure, which favoured the consolidation of the family enterprise in a natural way.
The Niemen Glassworks was one of the more prosperous companies in the glass trade during the inter-war period. The history of the factory goes back to the 1990s, when Juliusz Stolle and Wilhelm Krajewski owned a small, primitive factory producing bottles in Ustroń, Lithuania. The investment gathered steam over time, and by the First World War, the Stolle & Krajewski Company owned three factories, technically well-equipped, replete, for instance, with their own lathe-room for preparing iron moulds, a twelve-pot furnace, and twenty hand presses. World War I marks a clear break in the factory’s operations. In 1915 production ground to a halt, and soon thereafter the Russian armies destroyed the ‘new factory’ in Ustroń, along with all of its stores. In the 1920s the factory director, Juliusz Stolle, and his two sons, Bronisław and Feliks, laboriously rebuilt the family company. Production was concentrated at the surviving factory in Brzozówka, which was furnished with new equipment that allowed the mass production of high-quality items.
Since the beginning of the glassworks’ existence, it had presented its line in advertising catalogues, the first of which is from 1911. Originally, lighting units took pride of place in the post-war line, along with numerous pressed glass designs and the costly Moser-style glass. The designer of the earlier models remains unknown – the models (as was the practice of the time) could have been copies or travesties of Czech glass, which was having its day on the European market, or perhaps original works put forward by Niemen modellers. (1) One of these was Michał Titkow.
By pure chance, Titkow did not go to work in the workshops after graduating, but was instead employed in the design room. After the demise of Sylwester Wasilewski, a proficient artist and the illustrator for the first three parts of the company catalogue, a successor was urgently sought. With his outstanding artistic abilities, Titkow turned out to be the finest candidate. (2) Being splendidly acquainted with the glassworks’ technical capabilities, he soon turned from being a self-taught man to a skilled, multifaceted designer, whose abilities were still admired decades later by the finest names in Polish glass art.
He was modest, conscientious, and disciplined. In an interview he gave in 1979, he took credit for only a few of the nearly 400 models from the fourth part of the design catalogue he had prepared for print in the late 1930s. The items he claimed as his own included some modest ashtrays (Catalogue Numbers 1724, 1728, 1731), herring trays (Catalogue Numbers 1735, 1736), plates, tazzas, and flower stands (Catalogue Numbers 1742, 1744, 1743, 1719). On the basis of obvious similarities, Titkow’s authorship can also be assumed for a large and impressive flower stand (Catalogue Number 1827). The above examples can in no way exhaust the list of his designs. The final form of the models adopted for serial production was the effect of collective decision-making, involving the opinions of glassworks masters, grinders, and decorators, while the deciding voice was given to Chief Director Bronisław Stolle. He was well versed in the current tendencies in European design, and he brought back objects from his numerous trips to be used as models or sources of inspiration. Among these were surely small items from Czech glassworks, above all from the famous Moser Company, the products of René Lalique, or the smaller French and Belgian companies. Titkow spoke of the Niemen products with his trademark restraint, saying that they were not ‘patented objects’, while adding, ‘but we seldom copied others’. (3) Even to this day, with such advanced research on the European glass of the inter-war period, it is hard to say beyond a shadow of a doubt if the Niemen models were conscious and blatant copies, or merely took some generally applied shapes, decorative motifs, and ornamental techniques. The fact that Niemen glass clearly draws from the Moser style is indisputable, but there are numerous remarkable models in the third part of the catalogue for which one searches in vain in Czech design. The inspiration of French glass would also seem evident, as shown for instance by the toiletry sets (e.g., Catalogue Number 1585). There are also sporadic examples of evident copying. The ‘softly blown’ vase (Catalogue Number 1109), produced in several colour schemes according to a model by Charles Cotteau (1927–1930), simply removed the artist’s original signature and that of the Belgian Scailmout Ltd.