LOT Phillips de Pury & Company  /  PHOTOGRAPHS PART I  / 

5

STANISLAW IGNACY WITKIEWICZ (Polish, 1885-1939) HELENA CZERWIJOwSKA Ewa Franczek and Stefan Okol...

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STANISLAW IGNACY WITKIEWICZ (Polish, 1885-1939) HELENA CZERWIJOwSKA Ewa Franczek and Stefan Okol...
STANISLAW IGNACY WITKIEWICZ (Polish, 1885-1939) HELENA CZERWIJOwSKA Ewa Franczek and Stefan Okolowicz Collection stamp in black ink on verso vintage gelatin silver print 6 1/8 x 4 5/8 in. (15.6 x 11.7 cm) 1912 PROVENANCE Ewa Franczek and Stefan Okolowicz Collection, WARSAW, POLAND Private Collection, NEW YORK Literature T.O. Immisch, Klaus E. Göltz, and Ulrich Polhmann, eds., Witkacy-Metaphysische/metaphysical, Leipzig, 1997, p. 89 (illustrated) Witkiewicz improvised an extension on his camera bellows to enable him to focus tightly on the face. Such close-up portraits were almost unknown until the late twenties. He made a series of similar portraits of friends and family in the period 1912-1914 that includes his self-portrait now in the Gilman Paper Company Collection. Stanislaw had been a tormented soul living in the shadow of his father, a celebrated painter and critic who shared the same name. He adopted the name Witkacy to make the distinction clear. At the time he made these portraits, he was caught in an existential struggle. Incapable of supporting himself, he lived at his parents' expense while his father was suffering with tuberculosis. Many young artists indulge in self-portraits and portraits of those close to them as one way to work through that self-discovery. One year later, at the insistence of friends, he began to see a Freudian psychiatrist about his schizophrenic hallucinations. The following year, in February 1914, his fiancée committed suicide because she had apparently fallen in love with another man. Witkacy was forever haunted by guilt over her death. Around the end of the First World War and after the death of his father, he began to practice as an artist and writer. A fascinating character, he made thousands of paintings, often while experimenting with drugs, and completed over two hundred literary and philosophical works, including the important theory of Pure Form. He ended his own life in September 1939, when he learned that Soviet troops were advancing on Poland from the East.
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