|
Witkacy
|
|
|
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939) -
Witkacy
as he's commonly known - is the most famous of the painters, writers and other artists associated with Zakopane. Born in Warsaw, the son of
Stanislaw Witkiewicz
, the eminent painter and art critic who created the so-called Zakopane Style of primitivist wooden architecture, it was in the artistic ferment of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Zakopane that Witkacy spent much of his early life. After quitting Zakopane following his fiancee's suicide, in 1914, Witkacy joined an expedition to New Guinea and Australia led by a family friend, the celebrated anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, and returned to a Europe on the verge of war. With the outbreak of World War I, the reluctant Witkacy, a Russian passport-holder, was compelled to travel to St Petersburg to train as an infantry officer. In the event, Witkacy's time in Russia proved influential to his artistic development. As well as experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs he began studying philosophy, a pursuit which strongly influenced the subsequent development of his work and art.
After surviving the war physically if not mentally unscathed, Witkacy re-established himself in Zakopane in 1918. From then on he developed his bubbling artistic talents in a host of directions, the most significant being art, philosophy, drama and novel writing . During the following fifteeen years or so, Witkacy produced over twenty plays, many of which were premiered in Zakopane by his own theatre company, formed in 1925, with several productions being staged in the epic surroundings of Morskie Oko Lake. An exponent of an avant-gardist theory of drama that extolled the virtues of "pure form" over content, Witkacy wrote dramas that are generally bizarre, almost surrealist pieces spiced up with large dollops of sex and murder. Cold-shouldered by uncomprehending 1920s Polish audiences, the Witkacy dramatic oeuvre was rediscovered - and banned for some time by communist authorities - in the 1950s, since when it's consistently ranked among the most popular in the country. Artistically, Witkacy's main interests revolved around the famous studio he set up in Zakopane, where he churned out hundreds of portraits, many commissioned, of his friends and acquaintances from the contemporary artistic world. A dedicated drug-experimenter, Witkacy habitually noted, in the corner of the canvas, which drug he had been taking when painting; the self-portraits in particular reveal a disturbed, restless aesthetic sensibility. Witkacy's novels - by common consent almost untranslatable - are similarly fantastic doom-laden excursions into the wilder shores of the writer's consciousness, a graphic example being Nienasycenie ("Insatiability", 1930), which revolves around an epic futuristic struggle between a Poland ruled by the dictator Kocmoluchowicz ("Slovenly") and communist hordes from China hell-bent on invading Europe from the east. In a sense, reality fulfilled Witkacy's worst apocalyptic nightmares. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, the artist fled east. On learning that the Soviets were also advancing into Poland in the pincer movement agreed under the terms of the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a devastated Witkacy committed suicide, a legendary act that ensured his place in the pantheon of noble patriots, as well as that of great artists, in the eyes of the nation Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
|
Poland,
|