Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939), known as Witkacy, was a Polish painter, playwright, novelist, and philosopher who became one of the most eccentric and original figures in twentieth-century Polish culture. Born in Warsaw, son of the writer and painter Stanisław Witkiewicz, he grew up in Zakopane in the Tatra mountains, which gave him his lifelong attachment to Tatra landscape subjects. The works in this batch, from 1900–1904, represent his early period—landscapes of the Tatras, an Italian landscape from a probable early trip, a composition with six figures—painted before his decisive aesthetic transformation. He travelled to Australia and New Zealand with the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski in 1914 (returning after the war's outbreak), and after the trauma of World War One he developed the 'Pure Form' theory that governed his mature painting. His later portraits—executed systematically with detailed notes on the substances consumed during their creation—are among the most extraordinary documents in the history of art. He committed suicide on 18 September 1939 when Soviet forces invaded eastern Poland.

The early Witkacy landscapes in this batch are relatively conventional—competent Tatra mountain views in the tradition of his father's Polish Highland subjects—without the radical formal experimentation of his mature work. His later Pure Form paintings abandoned naturalistic representation for a concentrated, expressionist figure imagery of great psychological intensity.

Witkacy is one of the most extraordinary figures in twentieth-century European culture—a painter, playwright (The Water Hen, The Shoemakers), novelist (Insatiability), and philosopher who created a total artistic vision of hallucinatory originality. His early Tatra landscapes are important as the foundation from which this radical development departed. His suicide on the day of the Soviet invasion gives his life a tragic historical coherence.