“I usually sculpture from my own imagination”. The sacred works of Janina Reichert-Toth in Lviv and Cracow

Abstract

This paper is a presentation of the biography of a forgotten Polish sculptor, Janina Reichert-Toth (1895–1986). One of the first female students of the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts, a student of Konstanty Laszczka, in the interwar years in Lviv she successfully created portraits, works of sacred art and monumental sculptures. Her promising career was interrupted by the outbreak of war. Following repatriation to Cracow in 1946, in the new realities of politics and life, she was no longer able to recover her pre-war status and artistic forms.