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Katia von Kobro, even as a child, “had the devil in her skin” and rebellion in her blood. She spent her childhood in a prosperous bourgeois home, but she had to grow up and develop professionally during a revolution that swept that home off the face of the earth. Katarzyna was captivated by new ideals, although later she wasn’t quite sure how to put them into practice in life. Her life’s purpose and calling turned out to be the art emerging in the new Bolshevik state.
Kobro, until then known mainly as the wife of Władysław Strzemiński, was an avant-garde sculptor and a promoter of the most modern solutions in art. Ambitious, confident, and certain of her concepts. “My sculpture,” she said, “is not what bankrupt and tarnished factory owners would want in their salons.”
She belonged to the Blok and Preasens groups. On her artistic path, she met outstanding creators of avant-garde art—Russians such as Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky, and Poles like Mieczysław Szczuka, Teresa Żarnower, Helena and Szymon Syrkus, Bohdan Lachert, Julian Przyboś, and Jan Brzękowski. Witkacy also crossed her path at some point. Her life and work took her through Hanseatic Riga, revolutionary Moscow, Smolensk during the Polish-Bolshevik war, and then to Vilnius, Szczekociny, Brzeziny, Żakowice, Koluszki, and Łódź, where she ultimately settled and where she passed away on February 21, 1951.
At her funeral at the Orthodox cemetery in Doły, only a few people attended—her daughter and a handful of friends. Władysław Strzemiński did not come.