Lena Pillico was born to a Jewish family in Łódź, Congress Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire (now Poland) in 1884 and moved to London in 1914 with her husband, painter Leopold Pilichowski, where she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. A versatile artist, she experimented with a wide range of materials and techniques, producing paintings on canvas, silk and velvet; textile designs, and tapestries. She was the first artist to have a solo exhibition under the auspices of the Ben Uri Art Society in 1927 and also exhibited with the Seven and Five Art Society, Whitechapel Art Gallery and Toynbee Art Club.
Painter and textile designer Lena Pillico was born Salomea Lena Goldmann in Łódź, Congress Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire (now Poland) into a Jewish family in 1884. She moved to England in 1914 with her husband, the painter Leopold Pilichowski, who became a significant figure during the early years of the Ben Uri Art Society, serving as its President from 1926–32. In order to create a distinct artistic identity, she altered her surname to become known as Madame Pillico. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and her work was included in The First Russian Exhibition of Arts and Crafts, Whitechapel Gallery (1921). She subsequently participated in the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s survey exhibitions of 'Jewish Art' in 1923 and 1927, respectively. She was the first female artist to hold a solo exhibition with Ben Uri, presented in her St John’s Wood studio in 1927 and was also one of the first women to exhibit with the Seven and Five Society between 1923 and 1927, including in the 1927 exhibition at the Beaux-Arts Gallery in London. Her paintings included landscapes, street scenes and portraits, while her decorative designs included both figurative and abstract motifs; she was also commissioned in 1921 to create designs for book plates for volumes donated to the new library at the recently founded Hebrew University in Jerusalem (Jewish Chronicle, 22 April 1921, p. 33). A fabric pattern designed by Pillico for W. Foxton Ltd. was illustrated in Artwork (October-December 1925) and in the following issue (January-March 1926) Maurice Fort described her 'hot-coloured exuberant fantasies', noting that 'her more complicated compositions are not always good, but her simpler work - for example, the painting of embracing figures shown in the last exhibition of the Seven and Five Society - shows that she is developing on her own lines, which is certainly more worthy of praise than imitations, however good, of Matisse and Picasso'.
In 1924 Pillico held an exhibition in her own studio on 7 Hill Road (a precursor to her solo show for the Ben Uri Art Society, three years later). The Times commented: 'As nearly as may be the paintings by Mme. Léna Pillico at her studio, […] seem to represent the direct outpourings of the unconscious mind, controlled, however, by artistic taste and judgement and a much higher technical ability than is usual in such productions' (The Times 1924, p. 12). The following year, she exhibited painted silks and velvets on Old Bond Street, demonstrating her 'extraordinary gift of colour' and the 'profound, if indefinable, emotional quality' of it (The Times 1925, p. 12). In 1928 Pillico was among 16 artists who exhibited work in the USA at the Brooklyn Museum's exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings by American and European Artists, showing 29 paintings (including five designs), compared to only 17 by her husband. In her 1931 exhibition at the Salon Club Gallery in Manchester, Pillico showed wall hangings, tapestries, shawls and paintings, proving her ability to experiment with a wide range of materials and techniques. The Manchester Guardian defined her 'a versatile artist to whom no material seems to come amiss. Her love of colour and her fondness for free spontaneous design finds expression in paintings on canvas, paper, cotton, silk, velvet, georgette, chiffon, and wood' (12 May 1931, p. 13). An exhibition of paintings on velvet and silk followed at the Johnson Gallery, London (1933). The Times praised Pillico's 'fertility of invention and intensity of colour effect', as well as the 'exotic' character of her work, adding that her 'designs, whether they incline to the geometrical or the naturalistic, have the unmistakable character of something welling up from the unconscious […] in both rhythm and colour they are essentially emotional, reflecting different moods in the artist'. It concluded 'It is clear that Madame Pillico has a talent, amounting to genius, for this kind of decoration' (19 December 1933, p. 10).
Lena Pillico died in Oxford, England in 1947. Her work was included posthumously in Michael Parkin's touring exhibition on The Seven and Five Society, 1920–35 (1979–80) held at Atkinson Art Galleries, Southport; Minories, Colchester; National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; and Newlyn Orion Gallery, Penzance. In 2017 her work from the Ben Uri Collection featured in Ben Uri's survey show, Art Out of the Bloodlands: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain. She was also included in the Ben Uri exhibition 'Sheer Verve': The Women's International Art Club 1898-1978 in 2023. Her work is held in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection and Salford Museum and Art Gallery.
Lena Pillico in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Lena Pillico]
Publications related to [Lena Pillico] in the Ben Uri Library