(b Warsaw, 24 Feb 1885; d Jeziory, Polesie, 17 Sept 1939). Polish writer, art theorist, painter and photographer. He was the son of the architect, painter and critic Stanislaw Witkiewicz (1851–1915), creator of the ‘Zakopane style’ (see POLAND, §§II, 3; V and fig. 5). He spent his childhood in Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains and was educated at his family home, a place frequented by artists and intellectuals, and also through his many travels to Eastern and Western Europe. From his wide acquaintance with contemporary art, he was particularly impressed by the paintings of Arnold Böcklin. Witkiewicz’s often interrupted studies (1904–10) under Józef Mehoffer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków had less influence than his lessons in Zakopane and Brittany with Wladyslaw Slewinski, who introduced him to the principles of Gauguin’s Synthetism. Witkiewicz abandoned the naturalism of his first landscapes, executed under the influence of his father, rejected linear perspective and modelling and began to use flat, well-contoured forms and vivid colours, as in Self-portrait with Flowers and Fruit (1913; Warsaw, N. Mus.). But his art escapes all classification, and any similarities to contemporary trends are only superficial. In the so-called ‘period of the monsters’ (1908–14) he created Expressionist-like compositions with fantastic creatures and deformed, ugly human figures. He exploited the ‘perverse harmony’ of complementary colours and turbulent forms.

• Witkiewicz, Stanislaw Ignacy
  • Formists
  • Poland, §III, 6: Painting and graphic arts, after c 1900