Portrait of a Man

Witkacy, or Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, as the son of the renowned painter, architect, and art theorist Stanisław Witkiewicz Sr., was immersed from an early age in a circle of distinguished artists and scholars of the older generation. During his childhood, he also befriended other promising individualists like Leon Chwistek and Bronisław Malinowski. He interrupted his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, where he was under the tutelage of Jan Stanisławski, in mid-1906 due to pressure from his father. Two years later, he returned to the studios of Józef Mehoffer and Władysław Ślewiński – painters who pursued a decorative, Art Nouveau approach to form.

Witkacy wrote about his reflections on the significance of form in visual art in his treatise New Forms in Painting and the Resulting Misunderstandings (1919). He also joined the avant-garde Kraków Formist artistic group (1917–1922). Unlike most avant-garde artists, Witkacy envisioned a dystopian influence of art on life. Rejecting abstraction, he declared that constructive innovation had been exhausted, that further distortions of realistic representation were impossible, and that the creation of “perverse compositions” and “subversive harmonies” was no longer viable. According to him, “pure” art was doomed to extinction in an era of social democratization, mechanized labour, and cultural uniformity, as metaphysics was increasingly replaced by utility.

As a consequence of this stance, he completely abandoned easel painting in favour of pastel portraits as a commercial enterprise, founding the S.I. Witkiewicz Portrait Company in 1925. The studio’s regulations mimicked the legal provisions of an ordinary business: they defined contract terms, types and prices of commissions, and rules for cooperation with “agents.”

The male portrait in the Szczecin collection was created in the second year of the company's existence, by which time Witkacy had stopped painting in clients' homes. The portrait belongs to category B+d, in which the quick "hatching" technique used by the artist, allowed to capture the subject’s defining features while also slightly enhancing their looks – something that likely pleased the clients, even if there were some playful, exaggerated touches. In this case it was probably Stanisław Alberti, in whose apartment the portrait originally hung. Alberti – an art historian, philosopher, publicist and later starost (community elder) of the Biała Podlaska district – was part of the artist's close circle. He reviewed dramatic and theatrical work by Witkacy but also promoted the work of other Zakopane residents, Jan Kasprowicz and Rafał Malczewski. In 1926, he moved from Kraków to Warsaw with his wife, writer Helena née Szymańska. 

Szymon Piotr Kubiak