Pastel on TIZIAN light gray paper. dimensions: in st: 63.5 x 46.5 cm.
Signed at bottom right: "Ign Witkiewicz 1926/ VIII"; at bottom left: "T.B" [in circle].
The work has an appraisal by Dr. Anna Żakiewicz dated May 2023.
Pastel after conservation. The glass was also replaced with TrueVue 70% museum glass.
Provenance:
- collection of Wanda Domaszewicz
- private collection, Kraków
From the expert opinion of Dr. Anna Żakiewicz:
Witkacy [...] in April 1925 formulated the principles of the one-man Portrait Company "S. I. Witkiewicz" and published them in the catalog of a joint exhibition with Tymon Niesiolowski at Warsaw's Garlinski Salon. He divided the images he made into five types, depending on the convention agreed upon with the Company's clients, and labeled them with successive letters of the alphabet from A to E. He charged fees for them from 100 to 350 zlotys per one. On each portrait, next to the signature, the artist placed the type designation and the date - the month and year, sometimes even the day. These annotations were often accompanied by additional information about drinking or not drinking alcohol, tea and coffee, smoking or not smoking cigarettes and taking drugs and medicines.
Witkacy most often executed type B, defined by him as "a characteristic type, but without the shadow of caricature [...] with a certain undercutting of the characteristic features, which does not exclude "prettiness" in female portraits. Relationship to the model objective".
The portrait of Janina Domaszewiczowa (1895-1937) perfectly meets these assumptions. It depicts the woman in an extremely subdued manner. The model wears the "tomboy" hairstyle fashionable in the 1920s, i.e. straight, smoothly styled hair cut slightly below the ears and a fringe cut above the eyebrows. Her blue eyes correspond with the soft coloring of her clothing and the more intense blue of the background. The portrait is enlivened by an etolo made of fox fur - black, with a slightly caricatured treatment of the animal's red muzzle hanging on her chest. The fox also has blue eyes, and a tongue protrudes from its muzzle. This is clearly a humorous accent, characteristic of Witkacy, introduced into a generally serious portrait of a person whose public activities certainly commanded considerable respect in those days, as well as sympathy, as evidenced by a memorial note published in Gazeta Lwowska (1937, no. 62, p. 3) after her death.
The portrait was painted between August 3 and 17, 1926, at the time when the artist was directing his own play "In a Small Manor" staged at the Little Theater in Lviv. The play premiered on August 12, and three days earlier - on August 9 - Witkacy gave a lecture entitled. "Theatrical Disagreements." The play featured two prominent actresses of the era: Stanislawa Wysocka (in the main female role - the ghost of Anastasia Nibkova) and Irena Solska (in the episodic role of the Cook), with whom the artist was associated in his youth. The play won the audience's approval, even though Solska left Lviv immediately after the premiere, leaving her small role to a prop girl, and Witkacy complained of little financial gain.
The artist stayed with his mother's relatives, Janina and Czeslaw Domaszewicz, owners of the Lauda estate near Lviv. Czeslaw's mother, Tekla née Jankowska, was the cousin sister of Maria Witkiewiczowa, Witkacy's mother. In return for hospitality, the artist made six portraits of the Domaszewicz family, including a double image of four-year-old twins Ewa and Wanda, daughters of Czeslaw's brother Aleksander, a neurologist and professor at Lviv University. Unfortunately, only one has survived from the entire collection - that of Janina, née Montwiłł, Czesław's wife.
Before returning to Zakopane, Witkacy wrote to his wife:, "The Domaszewiczes are extremely nice (Janka turned out to be very nice. They invite us in the winter together necessarily.)" (See S.I. Witkiewicz, Letters to his wife (1923-1927), ed. J. Degler, Warsaw 2005, p. 115).
To sum up - the portrait of Janina Domaszewiczowa is an extraordinary image of an extraordinary woman - an independence and social activist, and at the same time one of the few surviving likenesses of Witkacy's family members.
