Centralne Muzeum Włókiennictwa

Krystyna Kondratiukowa. Founder and first director of the Museum of the History of Textiles

She was born in 1913 into a family of weavers in Lodz. Her professional career began in 1932 in K. Scheibler’s factory. From Lodz, she moved East (Bialystok, Brzesk, Pinsk), where in the 1930s she taught weaving and arranged folk art exhibitions.

After the war, she returned to Lodz. She studied at the university, graduating with a Master of Arts degree in 1952. She started to work at the Museum of Art, where she founded the Department of Weaving. Since then, her efforts were aimed towards the creation of a textile museum, a much needed and widely expected institution in Lodz, though it was organized in the midst of factual disputes and bureaucratic obstacles. Kondratiukowa impressed others with her ability and determination to solve problems at the highest levels of state, and, when the museum was already formed, with her great talent as a maker of contemporary art. In 1954, she chose (together with Adam Nahliki, her successor as director) the declining part of an industrial cotton plant of F. Dzierżyńsky’s to house the museum buildings. This factory building called the "White Factory", was Lodz’s oldest, multi-departmental textile plant, which in this unfavorable times of post-industrial architecture revitalization required real vision and courage.

As the director of the Museum of the History of Textiles (since 1960), she focused primarily on collecting historical fabric, creating a collection of contemporary textile art and documenting and promoting the work of contemporary artists. The first feature exhibitions ware arranged with a clear educational and ideological perspective (by necessity, they had to present a "connection between art and this textile city"), but thanks to her intuition she presented the most valuable fabrics from the beginning, arousing the interest of other cultural institutions in the country and abroad. She presented young textile artists and the patrons of their artistic careers, organized retrospectives of recognized artists and promoted Polish fabric at exhibitions in Europe, Africa, North America and South America. As the commissioner of the national team, she contributed to the success of the Polish weavers at the 1962 Biennial of Tapestry in Lausanne (now regarded as the beginning of the global reputation of the "Polish school of textiles"). She invented the National Triennial of Industrial Textiles and Tapestry (1972), which three years later, as an international exhibition, gave birth to the still ongoing International Triennial of Tapestry. For the sake of popularizing and preserving the knowledge of contemporary fabric, she wrote much (including the museum's bulletin, which launched in 1968), and started collecting an archive in the museum of various fiber artists.

Under the supervision of Kondratiukowa, the museum's collection gradually increased in size as they obtained the highest quality of artistic acquisitions. As the director, she demonstrated an eclectic taste that kept the museum from making larger mistakes in deciding what to purchase.

Krystyna Kondratiukowa planned, within one institution, to combine the museum’s historical and contemporary collection with an institute of textile research, an office of exhibitions and a scientific center. Her vision has not yet been fully realized. She worked in the days when ambitious plans were ruined by bureaucracy, financial shortages and a lack of full understanding of the status of the culture. The day after her retirement (1976), she received an honorary curator position. She died in Lodz in 1999.

The biography Krystyna Kondratiukowa to a large extent is not contained in the dates of her CV, but in the achievements of the initiator, founder and first director of the Central Museum of Textiles. (Lt)