Witkacy: Caught In the Middle

Stanisław Witkiewicz’s work is a bit of a head-bender and is what you’d have to call semi-abstract.

His father was also a painter and both parents hailed originally from Lithuania, though the young Witkiewicz was born in Warsaw and raised in the family home in the Zakopane region of Poland, which you can think of as a mountainous repository of Polish Folk Culture. (The inhabitants are called Gorali, which roughly translates as Highlanders). From his wiki:

Witkiewicz was reared at the family home in Zakopane. In accordance with his father's antipathy to the "servitude of the school," he was home-schooled and encouraged to develop his talents across a range of creative fields. Against his father's wishes he studied at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts with Józef Mehoffer and Jan Stanisławski.[2]

In the past year I’ve read a lot of articles on the English language website Culture.pl, and I don’t think I can hope to be anywhere near as comprehensive as they are or wiki. All I can tell you is why this artist sticks in my mind.

As a dual-national (Poland and Australia for me), it’s easy to get parochial about the cultural heritage of your parents. I think I’ll be putting up a few more articles about Poland and the surrounding area in the future but i’ll be trying to stick with what I truly like.

Poland’s overall painting history will probably strike most western viewers as very formal, sombre and academic. I’ll take that as both a good and a bad thing. Painting had a purpose, and the purpose was mainly to tell the national story. It needs to be said that a big flurry of work really starts from the 19th century, when the nation was under foreign occupation and seeking to keep alive a cultural identity. Compared to international cultural output, it seems heavy on the gloom…. and war.

Modernism did spread its tentacles out there though, but nowhere near as diabolically as in the west. I’m happy to say that, overall, Modernism was a blight, and its remnants still plague not only historical galleries, but contemporary ones and the architecture of our streets. It’s also completely distorted the critical framework for multiple generations now, so that no one really knows what is good or not anymore. The gatekeepers who control who gets support and help in the visual arts are just as stuck in this mental prison as everyone else. Really they are just as guilty of following a script of “what they are meant to like” as the traditionalists that they overthrew in the early 20th century. So it’s all come full circle. The public, many of whom hated modern and postmodern art, in turn either declared to hate art in general, or brainwashed themselves into thinking it must be good because it was so hard to understand. Like a game of pong that someone has set up to be never-ending, the negative feedback bounces back and forth and and back and forth. You may throw your hands up in the air, leave in frustration, come back 20 years later, and it’s all still the bloody same.

…until, fingers crossed, you run out of other people’s money (thanks Maggie T, I pray to your everlasting honourable memory that it shall become so).

Because you see, behind this corrupt and ugly visual landscape is a lot of public money and a lot of unpayable taxpayer debt. Or a lot of wall-street wealth-funnelling, which in turn is also attributable to government policy. The value of artworks are detached from reality.

It will come to an end. Mark my words. No one cares about a banana taped to a wall and when the money dries up, no one will make any effort to preserve it. Your job now is to ignore it and all the other garbage gimmicks, and pay more attention to what you like.

For my part, I think I’m in a position where i’ve seen a lot of the work of the outsiders and insiders pass by my nose. I hate a lot of modern art, but not all of it. Some of it might be worth keeping and protecting from the great skip-bin of history.

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (pronounced Vit-kiyev-itch) was the son of another painter called Stanisław, and to distinguish from his father, he is colloquially known as Witkacy (pronounced Vit-kat-tsee).

He obviously inherited the passion for painting from his father, who himself did some pretty likeable work, but decided to be a bit more adventurous and get in on the painting trends emerging in the early 20th century. But Witkacy also had other side-projects, included as a writer and playwright. After the tragic suicide of his fiancee in 1914, he was convinced to go on a scientific expedition to Australia with his good friend, the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski. Awkward timing. The following occured, as described in Malinowski’s wiki:

Shortly afterward, his situation became complicated due to the outbreak of World War I. Although Polish by ethnicity, he was a subject of Austria-Hungary, which was at war with the United Kingdom. Malinowski, at risk of internment, nonetheless decided not to return to Europe, and after intervention by a number of his colleagues, including Marett as well as Alfred Cort Haddon, the Australian authorities allowed him to stay in the region and even provided him with new funding.[12]: 333 [14]: 138 [18]: 4–5 [19]: 136 

They were meant to ultimately go to Papua but quarelled in Australia, wherupon Witkacy returned to Europe. Witkacy, who was a Russian Imperial subject (Poland still being occupied by three surrounding nations: Russia, Austria and Germany), travelled to St Petersburg and, according to wiki:

and was commissioned as an officer in the Pavlovsky Regiment of the Imperial Russian Army.[4] His ailing father, a Polish patriot, was deeply grieved by his son's decision and died in 1915 without seeing him again.[7]

Witkacy’s life itself ultimately ended tragically. When the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Act was signed and Poland was invaded by Germany, he escaped to the small town of Jeziory with his young lover Czesława Oknińska, but then upon hearing of the Soviet invasion from the east a few days later, committed suicide. Even though he got the agreement that she would join him in suicide by consuming luminal, she nevertheless survived. (Hitler was much more savvy in his choice of suicide brides). Between the wars he had what looks to be a damn good time. This was an era when Poland was newly independent after over 120 years of foreign occupation, and attempting to re-establish civic life, under the leadership of the quite likeable Marshal Jozef Piłsudzski, as a nation-back-from-the-dead while the rest of Europe was counting the toll from WW1 and interwar political upheaval. In a way it was an East-European roaring 20s. (Oddly enough, Poland’s first official president as a new nation, Gabriel Narutowicz, was assassinated in 1922 by a painter while attending an art exhibit, less than one week into the job).

Anyway, on to the paintings.

In real life I saw a bunch of them in the Muzeum Narodowe in Krakow. They’re big enough but not all-dominating. Think Large TV. There were a few hanging in sequence. He didn’t do many.

I think I like them because they break-character among the visual landscape of Kraków in Winter. Poland is a nice place but colours tend to be muted, owing to the cold climate, weight of tradition and more sombre atmosphere. The colours you see in Witkacy’s paintings really break out and stand out. They are vaguely hallucinatory, (okay surrealist), but with enough of a grasp of form that a viewer can find a way in and appreciate them without needing to read the explanatory plaque first.

I have a book of his drawings at home, accompanying his poems. I can’t read the poems, my Polish is just not that great. But I can understand and appreciate the drawings. And hopefully, if it works well as art, you can too. So i’ll leave it there, without rabbitting on too much.

'Falsehood of a Woman' by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1927, photo: National Museum in Warsaw

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz - Witkacy - Composition 1 - 1922

'Portrait of Nena Stachurska' by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1929, photo: Wikimedia Commons via Culture.pl

Also in his body of work is an insane amount of drawings and portraits. Quite a number were produced under the influence of drugs and he signed them according to what the substance was. Some were more benign than others (eg: from hashish, peyote and coffee among others). It should be noted that the amount he took was refuted. A friend who hosted the parties wrote years later (in an article titled Witkacy wasn’t a drug addict”) that Witkacy drug-taking was over-scandalised, and he was mainly interested in how different substances would affect how one produced an artwork.

An excerpt from my book of ‘Poeze i Rysunki’ (drawings) by Witkacy.

Witkacy was heavily involved in the theatrical arts too (Kraków has long had a culture of cabaret clubs, theatre groups, opera and other live performance). Any publication or search of him will inevitably throw up some very dramatic photographs, like this one and the one below.

My word, the drama of it all…

Witkacy, Composition 1922 (National Museum, Kraków)