Józefa Wnukowa

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Józefa Wnukowa was a pioneer in the field of decorative fabric. Her painting and weaving passions, combined with her affinity for large-format projects, allowed the artist to create a new form of expression in the 1950s: the kołtryna.

The post-war period was, for her and for her friends of the ‘Sopot School’, the most fruitful and satisfying. This group of like-minded painters, sculptors, and architects defended their values before the social realist program, creating many remarkable works and educating many years of skilled art graduates.

The speciality of the Academy of Visual Art in Gdańsk (its headquarters in Sopot) in the early 1950s was large-format plein-air fabrics and tapestries, known as kołtryny, which could reach 60–80 meters squared. Józefa Wnukowa thus recalled those beginnings:

We had the deep conviction that a modern decorative fabric should, through its painterly energy, become an organizing element in architecture. We wanted to find a technique for our designs that would allow us the fullest painterly expression in fabric.(1)

The works of the ‘Sopot School’ were marked by rhythmic patterns and vivid colour schemes, their decorations generally made by painting or printing. The appearance of such modern-looking decorative fabrics evoked lively interest among many arts communities, starting a fashion for these pikasy. Small associations and artists’ studios all around Poland began making curtain, tablecloth, and tapestry fabrics – multicoloured and painted in abstract patterns – which became prized possessions for young people seeking to furnish their apartments in a cheap and modern way.

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Józefa Wnukowa, decorative printed fabric, for the Central Linen Industry Laboratory in Żyrardów, made at the State Visual Arts Academy Decorative Fabrics Arts and Research Institute in Sopot, 1962-1963. Property of the State Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw, deposit to the National Museum in Warsaw, photo: private collection

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The academy in Gdańsk had a remarkable staff, chiefly composed of adherents of colourism, who educated a new generation of artists, adept not only at painting and sculpture but also at applied art. As Wnukowa stated, the notion of the ‘Sopot School’ did not indicate a style. It defined an attitude of a group of friends who were artists, and who, against the doctrine of social realism, created abstract, multicoloured fabrics in the 1950s. The Sopot community was not only involved in educational work, but also in renovating Gdańsk’s Old Town, organizing an ongoing Fine Arts Festival in Sopot (from 1948 onward), and jazz festivals (Sopot stood behind the first International Jazz Music Festival in Gdańsk in 1956), which drew young artists.

The Decorative Fabrics Institute was established in the painting department at the turn of 1952/1953. The working conditions were still very primitive: painting was done with pressure cookers until better equipment could be bought from artists’ collections. This period saw the expansion and modernization of the academy’s base of workshops. Among the available methods, they selected silkscreen as a technique that would allow them to carry out designs most quickly. They prepared a six-metre table, screens of various gradations (allowing for the printing of fabrics with large reports), a high-pressure cooker, and a station for oxygen baths. They introduced extra background layers by hand using stencils. Education was mainly focused on design, and the students encountered the technology only when it was time for the work to be made. Less often they learned weaving, and if Gobelin tapestries or carpets were made, they were made to scale.

We initially printed smaller layouts, partly hand-painting specially marked areas – and thus we managed to dispose of the monotony of rhythmically repeating patterns. We printed and painted by hand using dyes whose lasting power was ensured by a chemical process. In this way we made fabrics that matched interiors.(3)

In the Sopot studios, they initially painted or printed colourful tapestries with flowers, fruit, animals, birds, fish, or seascapes. The pattern was layered, often with a graphic contour. The resulting works were generally more reminiscent of pictures or drawings than fabric with a visible weave or texture. Sopot artists, as Wnukowa recalled, were dazzled by the new technological capabilities of print; they created fabrics akin to painting, whose large colour surfaces were effective in interiors and outside spaces.

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The very colourful tapestries of the Sopot Decorative Fabrics Institute were most often produced on linen or on sailcloth. The inexpensive materials and simple technology were vital advantages, as many fabrics were made on architects’ commissions for newly constructed buildings, or for those reconstructed after the war. They created an ambience and gave a special feel to cafe interiors, theatres, cabarets, or private apartments with modern interiors. The monumental kołtryny also filled a vital function in the arrangements of exhibits and fair displays, and the technique was used for backdrops and curtains for theatre, ballet, and stage performances. In the latter half of the 1950s, the period of the political ‘thaw’, artists could allow themselves more freedom in expression and technical experiments. The students became proficient in the use of the silkscreen. The 1:1 scale designs were less work-intensive than the fabrics. Wnukowa’s closest collaborators included: Gizela Bachtin, Daniela Droździecka, Krystyna Jacobson, Zofia Polasińska, Zula and Marian Strzelecki, Bernarda Świderska, and Anna Wójcik. Many graduates – Julia Strzelecka, Małgorzata Żerwe, Ewa Łukiewska, Anna Wójcik, Maria Jujka, and Adela Szwaja – worked in the discipline after leaving school.

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Standard, one of the most well known plein-air fabric designs by Józefa Wnukowa, was commissioned by Jerzy Hryniewiecki in 1953 for the 1st Polish Industrial Exhibition in Beijing, and was marked by a legible composition with both symbolic and local motifs. Decorated with doves and ribbons, it was reminiscent of the folk krajki. The Red Ribbons fabric was a collective project painted for World Youth and Students’ Day in Bucharest (1953). Kołtryny just as often featured geometrical patterns in rhythmic sequences, as in Geometrical and Ambers, and in the massive ‘canopy’ with sun and moon motifs – a team project for the 10th-Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw (1955), designed by Ryszard Kozakiewicz.

Wnukowa and her cohort also designed fabrics for industrial production. From 1947–1949 they supplied fabric prints to the Production Aesthetics Supervision Bureau for clothing and decorative fabrics, and designs for tapestry and carpet fabrics. From 1962–1963, when demand for one-of-a-kind tapestries was exhausted, the Central Laboratory of the Linen Industry ordered a linen collection from the Sopot designers, which were produced by Zyrardowskie Linen Factories. The patterns for these fabrics were predominantly colourful, floral compositions that covered the entire surface area. This difficult undertaking involved the cooperation of designers and chemical engineers. Attributes of the Sopot School, i.e., a prominent and large-format report, a bold colour scheme of contrasting tones, and the texture of linen fabric, were left intact.

Józefa Wnukowa and the Sopot School of Decorative Fabrics - Image Gallery

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At the academy, fitted carpets were made with painting techniques and film print for the interiors of the castle in Gołuchów (1960–1961) and in Książ Wielki near Wałbrzych (1970–1972). The works with large net, flower, or spotted patterns replaced the cordovans destroyed during the war. Juliusz Studnicki, Hanna and Jacek Żuławski, and graduates of the Sopot academy joined Wnukowa in this work. The artists also made fabrics of comparable format, but with classical Gobelin techniques, for the Bydgoszcz Philharmonic.

The Sopot kołtryny had their greatest success in 1955 in Warsaw, at the Fabric and Ceramics Exhibition at Gdańsk’s Academy of Visual Art. Apart from plein-air fabrics from Beijing and Bucharest, the rooms of what became Zachęta Gallery displayed Zofia Polasińska’s Red Tulips and Krystyna Jacobson’s Colorful. Liberated from the strictures of fabric techniques, the colourful tapestries were given the artists’ personal, painterly styles, while many new subjects also emerged as the artists’ personal statements, as departures from the historicism and folksiness that had so recently been compulsory. These were the first fabrics without reports, and with forms free of constraint.

Józefa Wnukowa (1912–2000), designer of Gobelin tapestries, paint and print decorated fabrics (both one-of-a-kind and industrially produced) and a painter, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1932–1935, graduated 1947), where she specialized in applied graphics and painting. After the war she transferred to Gdańsk, where she ran the Decorative Fabrics Institute and Classical Fabrics Studio at the State Academy of Visual Art. She and her students created a style of fabric decorating known as the “Sopot School.” She designed one-of-a-kind fabrics she called kołtryny – large-format occasional, curtain, and wall-hanging fabrics decorated with print and painted, which were hung in sites of national importance. She made the curtain and costumes for the Silesian Song and Dance Group and for the Baltic Opera. She participated in rebuilding the Gdańsk Old Town (wall paintings, 1953–1955). In the 1960s she designed fabrics for the Central Laboratory of the Linen Industry.

Author: Anna Demska

Text originally published in Out of the Ordinary: Polish Designers of the 20th Century, edited by Czesława Frejlich and published by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute (Warsaw, 2011) in cooperation with the Karakter publishing house. Translation by Søren Gauger, edited for the purposes of Culture.pl by Agnieszka Le Nart. For more information on the book, see: www.karakter.pl

Notes:

^{(1) J. Wnukowa, Tkaniny sopockie, “Projekt” 1956, no. 2, p. 46.
(2) Cf. Akademia Sztuk Pięknych w Gdańsku 1945–2005. Tradycja i współczesność, 60 lat ASP w Gdańsku, exhibition catalogue, ed. W. Zamorzyński, Gdańsk 2005, p. 23.
(3) J. Wnukowa, see above, p. 46.}

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