WITKIEWICZ
(WITKACY) :
A THEORITICIAN 
"Selfportrait",
oil, 1906
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz was born on February 24th 1885 and learned painting with his father Stanislaw (1851-1915).
He started to exhibit his works in 1928 at the Polish section of the Paris Salon dAutomne before playing a major role in the development of painting in his country.
Known as an art theoretician and as a philosopher he also played a major part in the evolution of modern theatre in Poland.
Witkiewicz travelled much, notably in France and in Australia in 1914. On his return from the Soviet Union in 1918 he joined an avant-garde group first known as the Polish Expressionists, which was founded in Krakow and was later called the Formist movement.
Witkiewicz tried mainly to superimpose symbolic expression accentuating the confusion of linear disposition and the distortion of figurative designs based on Art Nouveau concepts with Surrealist references. He notably wrote an essay entitled New Forms in Paintings and the Misunderstandings they Provoke in 1919 proclaiming the necessity of a full emancipation from the figurative content towards pure form. He thus was calling for the downgrading of art for which he saw no place in our modern world.
From 1924 Wikiewicz decided to paint portraits with much expressive force via the use of narcotics. He also wrote many philosophical and theatrical essays and was a pioneer of modern theatre plays in which absurd situations prevail. Radically attached to the independence of man he committed suicide in September 1939 shortly after the invasion of Poland by German and Soviet troops.
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