Barbora Didžiokienė

The artist Barbora Didžiokienė (1896–1976) was born in Saint Petersburg and came to Lithuania in 1921. After a few years she debuted in the exhibition organised by the Plastic Art Division of the Lithuanian Artists’ Society where the pictures with figures of dolls were among the first compositions close in style to Art Deco. In her diary Didžiokienė described her idea to sew the characters for her future paintings: ‘As I was not rich and had no money to buy fabrics for the background of pictures (draperies) to paint still lifes with vases, flowers and fruit, I decided to sew dolls and dress them in various clothes. I even created stage settings of rooms and gardens myself and then painted scenes from the life of dolls. Actually, my dolls were not very pretty, but later heads of dolls manufactured abroad appeared in our shops. They were absolutely wonderful, and therefore I only wrapped the ‘skeleton’ in a rag body and then attached a purchased head to it. I tried to keep the exact proportions and by bending the wire inside a doll I could achieve any posture as the dolls were affixed to special stands.’  

Reference: Barbora Didžiokienė, Memories of the little artist, compiled by Ramutė Rachlevičiūtė, translation from Russian by Ona Mickevičiūtė, Vilnius, 2015, vol. 2, p. 133).