Dimensions: 62.2 x 46.7 cm
Signed and dated l.d.: 'Ignacy Witkiewicz 1931 V', inscribed p.d.: '(T.B) NP 63 + porter'.
In light of recent research, the portrayed may have been Herman Mangel, a doctor from Zakopane, who provided medical care for Witkacy's mother.
Origins
private collection, Kraków
DESA Unicum, September 2020
institutional collection, Warsaw
Literature
compare: Irena Jakimowicz, Witkacy. Painter, Warsaw, 1985, cat. no. 187 (ill.), p. nlb.
Biography
His father was the well-known critic, painter and writer, creator of the so-called "Zakopane style" in architecture Stanislaw Witkiewicz. In 1905-10, he studied unsystematically at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow with Jozef Mehoffer and with Wladyslaw Slewinski in Poronin. He traveled to Italy, France and Germany. In 1914 he participated in Bronislaw Malinowski's ethnographic expedition to Australia, from where he returned to Europe on hearing of the outbreak of World War I. His early painting work was under the sign of Young Poland and the influence of P. Gauguin and Wl. Slewinski. Later he came to a kind of expressionism. In time, as a result of theoretical reflections on form, he gave up painting. He founded a one-man "Portrait Company" and limited himself to making pastel portraits for a living, often created under the influence of stimulants that allowed him to experiment with form. Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz wrote 4 novels, more than 40 dramas, numerous articles and essays on painting, literature, theater and philosophy. During the interwar period, he lived mainly in Zakopane. After the outbreak of World War II, he fled from the Germans to the eastern borderlands, where he committed suicide in the village of Jeziory in Polesia on September 18, 1939.
