Born to a Jewish family in Poland in 1894, Katerina Wilczynski trained as an artist in Germany and Paris and first found success working in poster design and book illustration. In 1930 she gained a Prix de Rome scholarship and relocated to that city, where her work included drawings of churches and monuments. In 1938, the new racial laws forced her to leave. After arriving in London in 1939 she made drawings recording war damaged buildings, some of which are now held by the Imperial War Museum. After the war, Wilczynski, familiarly known as Katchen, travelled widely, recording her journeys in sketches. During this period she exhibited her drawings in London galleries and continued to work as an illustrator of others’ books and her own, always signing her work ‘WILC’. A commissioned group of portraits of writers, including Camus, Sartre, T.S. Eliot and Herbert Read, for a proposed book ‘European Portraits’, was never published but survives in the Bibliotèque Nationale and National Portrait Gallery. Further work is held in the Ashmolean Museum and public collections in Dresden and Cologne. The V&A hold eleven drawings by Wilcznyski, including three of Delphi dated to various years in the 1960s. Wilczynski died in London in 1978.
Design of the textile
Wilczynski drew extremely rapidly, without preliminary drawings, a technique which helped her hold fast to intuition, preferring this to close copying from nature. This speed endeared her to her portraiture models and worked well for recording street and theatre scenes. Unusually, she developed a system of using both right and left hands to draw, the right hand starting the drawing and the left adding shape and character. Having been fascinated by Greek myth since childhood, from 1952 onwards Wilczynski started to make extended trips to Greece where the connection between temples and nature, sculpture and human figures appealed to her and enabled her to place her subjects in ‘real’ settings, frequently superimposing figures onto the buildings they inhabited. Her publications based on these trips include ‘Daphnis and Chloë’ (Bruno Cassirer, 1946), and ‘Homage to Greece’ (Macmillan, 1964), her most successful publication in which her fascination for Delphi is particularly marked. The textile design retains the spirit of these rapidly executed topographical sketches, and like them is labelled with the place name written boldly above the image.