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Czajkowski, Józef
(b Warsaw, 27 Jan 1872; d Warsaw, 27 July 1947). Polish architect, interior designer, teacher and painter. In 1891 he left Poland to study painting at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich, and later in Paris, under Jean-Paul Laurens, Benjamin Constant and James McNeill Whistler. He then studied (1894–5) at the School of Fine Arts, Kraków, and at the School of Industrial Art, also in Kraków. He was co-founder of the Polish Applied Arts Society (1901–14), a pioneering institution set up to develop the crafts in Poland. With other members of the society, including Tadeusz Stryjenski, he designed the interiors (1903–6) of the Old Theatre, Kraków, in a style influenced by Art Nouveau. He was also a co-founder of the Kraków Workshops (1913–26), which were housed in the town’s Museum of Technology and Industry, and he designed stucco reliefs for the façade of this building. Czajkowski was a leading supporter of the Arts and Crafts Movement in Poland, but he increasingly inclined towards the Polish ‘mansion house’ style, for example his design (1908; unexecuted) for a house at Opinogóra, Ciechanów. This trend continued in the buildings he designed for an exhibition in Kraków on architecture and interiors in a garden setting (1912), which he helped organize, and in his award-winning Polish Pavilion (destr.) for the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (1925), Paris. In this building he combined the principles of classical composition with stylized folk ornament and simplified, crystalline forms; he also designed a room at the exhibition (see POLAND, §V and fig. 16). Czajkowski established and was professor (1913–19) at the Department of Architecture, Academy of Fine Arts, Kraków; he subsequently taught (1919–23) at the University of Stephan Batory, Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania), and was a professor at the School of Fine Arts, Warsaw (1922–38), where he introduced elements of vernacular art to the curriculum. He also co-founded (1926) the Lad Cooperative, designed furniture, tapestry and stained-glass windows and painted—mainly oil portraits, landscapes and rural scenes.
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