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Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, a.k.a. “Witkacy” (February 24, 1885 in Warsaw – September 18, 1939 in Jeziory, Polesie) was a Polish writer, dramatist, photographer, philosopher and painter. Son of Stanislaw Witkiewicz. His godmother was Helena Modrzejewska. Witkiewicz was raised at the family home in Zakopane. In accordance with his father's antipathy to the "servitude of the school", the young Witkiewicz was home-educated and encouraged to develop his talents across the creative fields. From childhood, Witkiewicz was a close friend of Bronislaw Malinowski. Following a crisis in Witkiewicz' personal life, Malinowski invited him to act as draughtsman and photographer on an expedition to Oceania in 1914, a venture interrupted by the onset of The Great War. Witkiewicz survived the Russian revolution in Petersburg. Later his works show his fear of social revolution and foreign invasion, but are written in absurd language. He had begun to support himself through portrait painting and continued to do so on his return to Zakopane in the new Poland. He entered into a major creative phase, setting out his principles in New Forms in Painting and Introduction to the Theory of Pure Form in the Theatre. He associated with a group of "formist" artists and wrote most of his plays during the period to the mid-1920s. Of the plays, only "Jan Karol Maciej Hellcat" met with any public success at the time. After 1925, Witkacy ironically re-presented the painting activity which provided his economic sustenance as the "S. I. Witkiewicz Portrait Painting Firm" with the motto "The customer must always be satisfied". Several grades of portrait were offered - from the merely representational, to the more expressionistic and to the drug-assisted. The paintings are annotated with mnemonics to indicate the drugs that were influencing him at the time, even if it was only a cup of coffee. In the late 1920s he turned to the novel, writing two works, Farewell to Autumn and Insatiability, the latter a major work encompassing geo-politics, psychosomatic drugs and philosophy. During the 1930s, Witkiewicz published a text on his experiences of Narcotics including peyote and pursued his interests in philosophy. He also promoted emerging writers such as Bruno Schulz. Witkiewicz had died in some obscurity but his reputation began to rise soon after the War which had destroyed his own life and devastated Poland. Czeslaw Milosz framed his argument in The Captive Mind around a discussion of Insatiability. The artist and theatre director Tadeusz Kantor was inspired by the Cricot group through which Witkiewicz had presented his final plays in Kraków. Kantor brought many of the plays back into currency, first in Poland and then internationally. The Ministry of Culture of Communist Poland decided to exhume his body, move it to Zakopane and give him a VIP burial. It was performed according to plan, though nobody was allowed to open the coffin delivered by the Soviet authorities. However, later genetic studies showed that the body belonged to
an unknown Ukrainian woman; a final absurd joke 50 years after his
last novel.
The paintings are the excellent portrayal of the events and scenes
that we see around us. The painters are the best cameras of the
world. They reproduce many different types of pictures. They even
draw imaginary pictures that do not exist in this world. We tend
to use both thinned oil paints and dense oil paints. Masterpieces
can be dyed more than once, but each time it may be different from
the existing paintings.h Sitemap famous paintings | famous painters | painting styles | famous artists | mixed media painting | painting technique | oil paintings | canvas painting | life oil painting still | abstract art paintings | modern art work | fine art painting landscape | oil painting reproductions - media | history of paintings | oil painting - idioms | links | review painting articles | review painting news | press release | Kids Costumes | Women costumes |
