witkacy - album.pdf - Galeria - nordsoft

Ubu Gallery

416 East 59 Street New York NY 10022

T: 212 753 4444 F: 212 753 4470 E: info@ubugallery.com

www.ubugallery.com

STANISŁAW IGNACY

Visit our partner Galerie Berinson, Berlin

www.berinson.de

Drawings from the 1930s

February 7—April 22, 2006

WITKIEWICZ

Ubu Gallery is pleased to announce “STANISŁAW IGNACY WITKIEWICZ (1885–1939):

Drawings from the 1930s,” an exhibition of over sixty rare works by the Polish painter, photog-

rapher, writer and theorist. Witkiewicz, also known as Witkacy, was a central ﬁgure among the

Polish intellectual elite and is considered to be one of the most creative and acute minds of inter-

war Europe. In all aspects of his life’s work, he championed the individual creative spirit and de-

fended it against the mechanized world, which he believed was alienating humanity from the true

structure of the universe, in his terms the “mystery of existence.” His metaphysical philosophies

about the human condition are expressed with immediacy in his drawings of grotesque, half-hu-

man creatures in phantasmagoric landscapes. While the artist’s proto-modern, psychological,

photographic portraits (a small selection of which also will be on view) are arguably his best-

known visual works, Witkiewicz’s drawings offer unique insight into the eccentricities of this

tortured and brilliant artist.

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz was born in Warsaw and in 1890 moved with his family to Zako-

pane, where his father would become well known as the creator of the “Zakopane Style” of hand-

icrafts and architecture. Early on, Witkiewicz showed signs of genius—playing piano, painting

and drawing at the age of six and reading scientiﬁc and philosophical works in various languages

at the age of seven. He wrote his ﬁrst critical essays, “On Dualism” and “Schopenhauer’s Philoso-

phy and His Relations to His Predecessors,” in 1902 at the age of 17. After obtaining his school

certiﬁcate in Lwów, he traveled throughout Europe for several years, returning to Poland to study

at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. He remained at the Academy for only one year before

returning to Zakopane, where he painted his series of romantic landscapes entitled Early Spring .

Over the course of the next few years, he traveled to France several times, becoming particularly

inspired by the Synthetism of Paul Gauguin while studying with Wladysław Slewinski in Brittany.

Witkiewicz also grew interested in the grotesques of 19th century artists Francisco de Goya and

Aubrey Beardsley. The dark, parodying tone in his depictions of sinister women in supernatural

settings appears in both the works from his ﬁrst solo exhibition (held in Kraków in 1913) and his

novel from this period, The 622 Falls of Bungo, or the Demonic Woman.

In 1914, devastated by the suicide of his ﬁancée, Witkiewicz traveled to Australia as a means of

escaping himself and his thoughts of taking his own life. As a member of a scientiﬁc expedition

organized by the famous anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, Witkiewicz documented the

journey with photographs and drawings. Upon returning home from the expedition, he enlisted

in the Russian Tsarist Army and served in World War I. After the War, he studied philosophy

in St. Petersburg and traveled in Russia for several years, before returning to Zakopane in

1918 where he would help to found the Formist movement. His approach differed from that of

other Formists, as Witkiewicz believed that “pure form” was not fully abstract and possessed

symbolism that embodied the restlessness and multiplicity of the human spirit. As a wounded

ofﬁcer, he had begun using narcotics. He came to believe that the controlled use of drugs

(ranging from mescaline, peyote and cocaine to caffeine and alcohol) liberated him and opened

windows into the psychology of his subject matter. He meticulously recorded on his works

each of the substances that he used while creating them. In the fantastical drawings at Ubu,

these notations appear next to his signature like obscure scientiﬁc equations. When Witkiewicz

opened the “S.I. Witkiewicz-Portrait Company” in 1924 in order to support himself, he continued

this controlled drug experiment as a means of gaining access to the “masks” that revealed

and concealed his subjects’ inner tensions. These intimate portraits (labeled type “C” among

his “categories” of portraits lettered A, B, C, D and E) were reserved for family members and

friends, and were generally not for sale. The artist also explored the complex inner workings of

his own psyche in a peculiar series of photographs that document his facial grimaces—attempts

at capturing his own evasive masks.

Throughout the 1930s, Witkiewicz continued to make commissioned portraits and to write

articles about philosophy and theater. He composed his fourth novel entitled The Only Way Out

while touring Poland as a lecturer on aesthetics. Plagued with bouts of depression, he became

obsessed with the idea of suicide. In September 1939, when Witkiewicz learned that Russian

troops were invading Poland from the East (having already ﬂed from the German troops that

were advancing from the West), he killed himself by slitting his wrists.

witkacy - album.pdf

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