Her designs for table-settings, trays, bowls, goblets, cutlery, ashtrays, and candlestick-holders demonstrate her extraordinary discipline in working with shapes that are perfect and sophisticated in their simplicity – such as circles and derivative forms, cuboids, and cones – and which are minimal and subtle in decor. They also show an impressive knowledge of the materials used to produce them. The dominant recurring attributes in Kielowa’s designs for tableware companies, and in the artist’s independent projects are: functionality, simplicity, contrast, and a tendency toward geometrical and fan shapes. All of these are typical of the fashions of the 1930s. One critic wrote: ‘The objects she makes are simple and fine (...), they have their own sense of expression. They are all for everyday use, and respond to an evident need.‘ (2)
The finest example of this functionality might be the breakfast set of 1935, commissioned by Fraget for furnishing the S. S. Piłsudski transatlantic liner. All the set’s pieces are ball-shaped, their only ornaments being disproportionately large handles or weights to support their stable, heavy lids. The form was evidently subordinated to the conditions of sea travel. All of Kielowa’s works are marked by simplicity, generally reducing the shape to basic geometrical figures. The above-mentioned contrast, meanwhile, is well illustrated by the silver coffee or tea sets, whose shiny, fluted parts are built compact and slender, but then complemented by black wooden handles that are repeating and rounded in form. The fan-shaped quality so characteristic of the inter-war period is found in many of Keilowa’s designs, including her one-of-a-kind auteur projects.
Julia Keilowa (1902–1943) was a highly regarded sculptress in the 1930s. She designed for the J. Fraget, the Hennemberg Brothers, and the Norblin tableware companies. She graduated from the Lwów State Industrial School. From 1925–1931 she was a student at the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 1929 she joined the Forma sculptors’ cooperative. She also worked as an editor and a journalist for the Bohêmaz pamphlet (1931). Her awards and distinctions included the Ministry of Foreign Affairs award (1935) and a prize at the International Art and Technology in Modern Life Exhibition in Paris (1937). In 1941 she co-organised and taught at a ceramics workshop in Lwów. She hid in occupied Warsaw until 1943, whereupon she died in mysterious circumstances.