Witkacy vs Russia: A Time of Creative Abundance

nevsky_avenue_in_the_19th_century_photo_wikipedia.jpg, full-width, Nevsky Avenue in the 19th century, photo: Wikipedia

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz’s stay in Russia during the years of World War I has been of great interest to researchers and lovers of his work for years. Anna Żakiewicz writes about Witkacy’s visual art, which he created during his stay in St. Petersburg.

From the perspective of the artist’s biography, this topic was taken up by Anna and Irena Jakimowicz, who wrote about his artwork during this period.

In the introduction to the first comprehensive edition of Witkacy’s dramas, Konstanty Puzyna wrote that it was there that –

... the artist by accident saw the face of the 20th century [...]. On the literary inspirations of Miciński, Przybyszewski, Wedekind, on the innocent drunkenness of the Young Poland bohemia of Kraków and Zakopane – was a superimposed catastrophic and monstrous new experience [...] The atmosphere of the life of the Pavlovsky Regiment, the drunken promiscuity, the sexual orgies, the whole ‘apres nous le déluge’, the great Russian decadence [...] left an indelible mark on all his works.

Witkacy’s letters from that time to his friend Bronisław Malinowski are well known, as is a letter from Aniela Jałowiecka, Witkacy’s aunt, to his mother, commenting on the beginnings of his stay in St. Petersburg. Witkacy also appears incidentally in the published memoirs of several people who came into contact with him at the time – Helena Duninówna, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław Miciński and the then thirteen-year-old Zofia Stulgińska. The Moscow Military-Historical Archive preserved a folder with documents of Witkacy’s military service, the contents of which have been known for nearly thirty years. I, myself several years ago analysed Witkacy’s series of astronomical compositions from the Russian period.

The circumstances surrounding Witkacy’s arrival in St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1914 can be described as dramatic. After the suicide of his fiancée, Jadwiga Janczewska, in February, the artist experienced a period of mental breakdown lasting several months, the cure for which was to be a journey to Australia. A friend from his teenage years, Bronisław Malinowski, who was going to a conference of anthropologists in Melbourne, suggested Witkacy go as a documentary filmmaker. They set off in mid-June, stopping in Ceylon on the way. However, their journey together was soon interrupted by the news of the outbreak of World War I. The artist decided to return to Europe. As a Russian citizen born in Warsaw, he could not return to Austrian Galicia in this situation. He chose St. Petersburg because there he had the support of his cousins, Ada and Władysław Żukowski. Being firmly convinced of the imperative to fight against the Germans, he entered officer’s school and, upon graduation, was drafted into the exclusive Pavlovsky Life Guards Regiment. In July 1916, he took part in one of the bloodiest battles of the Great War – at the Stochod River in western Ukraine. The fate was all the crueller for the artist because on the other side, together with the Austrian army, the 2nd Brigade of the Polish Legions was fighting... For his participation in the battle, Witkacy was promoted to lieutenant and awarded the Order of Saint Anna, 4th Class.

After the October Revolution, in mid-November 1917, Witkacy parted company with the Russian army, placing himself at the disposal of the Supreme Polish Military Committee. However, judging by the dates of the portraits and compositions preserved from this period, all these events did not interfere too much with the artists work. In fact, 67 of his works from this period have survived, including – 5 self-portraits, 29 portraits, 26 fantastic pastel compositions, 1 gouache, 2 bookplates, 1 book cover and 3 oil paintings. As can be seen, this collection is diverse enough to allow a fairly multifaceted understanding of its creator. Moreover, Witkacy was in the habit of dating his works; some even have a daily date, which makes the life of a historian extremely easy, as the artist’s development can be quite precisely followed on this basis. In turn, by juxtaposing individual works with other sources, we learn what happened to Witkacy during that period of his life, although this is obviously not a complete picture.

Автопортреты Виткация, фотография 1912 года и пастель 1927 года, источник: www.witkacy.org — Witkacy's selfportraits, photography from 1912 and pastel from 1927, photo source: www.witkacy.org

Two charcoal-drawn portraits – one of a woman and one of a man – bear the date 1915. The meticulousness of their execution and the fact that they survive to this day indicates that they were created in the first half of the year, still in St. Petersburg, rather than in field conditions. The female portrait, in particular, is characterised by almost photographic verismo in contrast to the more sketchy and more freely drawn portrait of an officer – Lieutenant Marynicz. Both show significant progress in relation to portraits that Witkacy created before the war, both in terms of technical proficiency shown, especially in the female portrait and in the characteristics of the figure; the officer portrayed has an unusually expressive face with slightly enlarged, lively eyes looking at the viewer. That feature would continue to recur in Witkacy’s portrait work for the rest of his life. Three other works are double-dated by the artist: 1915-1918. They were most likely begun in 1915 and completed or reworked three years later. Two of them are portraits – a self-portrait and an image of a young woman wearing a hat. Unlike the above-mentioned pair of portraits, they are slightly under-painted in pastel; it was probably this addition that the artist introduced later – at the time when he was already comfortable with this technique. Of particular note is the third work marked with a double date. It is The Kiss of the Mongolian Prince in Ice Desert – an elongated, horizontally stretched fantastic composition painted in gouache. It refers to the artists pre-war works called monsters' because of the bizarre nature of the figures depicted in them. It is also an example of Witkacys fascination with the literary work of Tadeusz Miciński; the phrase ice desert' used in the title is taken from one of his works. Some themes of Russian art, with all its fantasy and fairytale-like qualities, can also be seen in the composition, although it would be difficult to find any specific source of inspiration. The Kiss ... was presented in St. Petersburg in May 1918 at an exhibition of works of art by Polish artists at the Anichkov Palace, so it is highly likely that Witkacy slightly modified the earlier work before the exhibition, and hence it bears two dates.

Another work begun in 1915 and completed later (as late as 1920) is a fantasy composition with an unknown author’s title. It is an oil painting depicting a cluster of creatures with deformed faces. It seems that this work can be linked without great risk to two later paintings from the series Temptation of St Anthony. We know that even before the war, Witkacy had been fascinated by Flaubert’s work of this title; he even drew a composition in charcoal depicting this theme; one of the characters in his first youthful novel, The 622 Downfalls of Bungo also read this work and was impressed by it. If we look closely at the oil painting Witkacy began in 1915, it is easy to see the similarity of his composition to Martin Schongauer’s renowned copperplate engraving from the 15th century depicting this theme. Both the St Anthony legend and Flaubert’s work feature a striking scene of a hermit being lifted by the Devil, and the whole story is full of fantastic, expressively described creatures. No wonder, then, that this theme has inspired artists since the Middle Ages and was also periodically taken up by Witkacy. In 1916, the artist drew one of his most interesting compositions in charcoal, slightly underpainted in pastel, known in literature as the Gravedigger’s Monologue, as it is clearly related to the scene with the gravediggers from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Stanisław Ignagy Witkiewicz, 'Kiss of a Mongolian prince in a glacial desert', 1915-1918

In 1916 was the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and the theatre society operating at the Polish House in Moscow, whose co-founders included Witkacy’s friends and mentors from his youth, Tadeusz Miciński and Mieczysław Limanowski, organised literary evenings combined with lectures on that occasion. Witkacy must have known about these events, which took place on 2 December 1915 and 17 May 1916, because reports on the society’s lectures were placed in Echo Polskie and Gazeta Polska, which were also published in St. Petersburg. Zenon Choroszczo’s memoirs, in turn, record a scene from the so-called Polish Café in St. Petersburg, where they argued, among other things, about how best Hamlet should be played. According to the author of the memoirs, one of the staunchest participants in the discussion was Witkacy, which means that he was interested in Shakespeare’s drama at the time, so it is not surprising that he created his own painting vision of one of its scenes.

Apart from Gravedigger’s Monologue, we know of 11 more works by Witkacy from 1916: these are 7 portraits (1 of the sculptor Władysław Gruberski, who lived in St. Petersburg, and 2 of his first wife Victoria, 2 portraits of officers and 2 of unidentified young women). Like the 1915 portraits, they are almost monochromatic, although in places, in addition to the primary drawing tool, which for Witkacy at the time was coal, the artist also used pastel to emphasise certain details. Witkacy’s mastery of portrait painting, already apparent at the time, can be evidenced by a comparison of one of the portraits of Victoria Gruberska, drawn according to the best rules of traditional nineteenth-century portrait painting (at which the Russians excelled, especially graduates of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, which Witkacy in St. Petersburg must surely have noticed and appreciated) with a portrait of a man in uniform – sketchily treated but no less expressive than a veristically worked-out female portrait.

In addition, Witkacy created 4 more compositions where he used pastels much more boldly than in the portraits. These compositions depict fantastic figures placed in an equally fantastic landscape. Unfortunately, we do not know the author’s titles of these works and have not yet been able to decipher their meaning, although knowing the artist’s creative method, we should suspect that each composition has a specific content; it is highly likely that they are related to some literary work, such as the already discussed Gravedigger’s Monologue with Hamlet or the oil composition with Flaubert’s The Temptation of St Anthony begun in 1915. In 1916, Witkacy began (or merely devised) another Temptation of St Anthony, which he completed five years later. This version is the most literal representation of the theme – the bearded hermit sits surrounded by three women, each offering him something different: the first – gymnastic prowess, the second – nudity, while the third, following the example of Eve in Eden – an orange globular fruit. Upon his return to Poland after the war, the artist not only completed the two works related to the Temptation but painted two others.

A very interesting example of the influence that theatre had on Witkacy – the painter, is Composition with Swans from 1916. It depicts a woman in a flowing dress walking across a footbridge on water, with giant swans swimming on either side of her. With a high degree of probability, it can be concluded that the inspiration for this composition was Swan Lake, a ballet by Pyotr Tchaikovsky.

From the following year, i.e. 1917, comes the largest number of surviving works that Witkacy made in Russia: 4 self-portraits, 14 portraits, 9 compositions and 2 bookmarks. He also began an oil painting known as Composition with Female Figures, although this work probably had some literary author’s title. Like The Temptation of St Anthony, the painted scene takes place in a landscape but is more dynamic, with the women’s loose robes fluttering in the wind and unidentified forms flying above their heads. Perhaps in the near future, it will be possible to explain this scene by tying it to some literary work, but no one has done that yet.

witkiewicz ignacy stanislaw witkacy portret_6261047.jpg — Witkacy's self-portrait, from the collection of Ewa Franczak and Stefan Okołowicz

Notable among the self-portraits is a striking image of the artist in the parade uniform of the Pavlovsky Regiment with a high guardsman’s shako on his head and a bust of the artist also in uniform against the background of a somewhat chaotic, typically bachelor' household, where shaving utensils are mixed with emptied bottles.

In March 1999, another previously unknown but absolutely unusual self-portrait from 1917 appeared on the art market in Warsaw. It depicts the artist in frontal view in the bust, with a samovar emerging behind his left shoulder. What draws attention in this self-portrait is the even distribution of colour accents, characteristic of Witkacy’s entire oeuvre – the cinnabar red of the hem of the shirt visible below the neck is repeated in the emphasis on the contour of the eyelids, the shape of the nose and the ears. The dark blue of the jumper has counterparts in the irises of the eyes, and the delicate white blips visible on the trim of the turtleneck collar offset the more intense white of the corneas and the white lights on the nose and temples. Typical of this period of Witkacy’s work is the modelling of the forehead with white, salmon and orangish-pink pastel streaks. Such a distribution of colours, as well as contrasting the dark blue of the jumper with the bright yellow on the samovar in the background and balancing this contrast with the black of the coat and the white of the left part of the background, also corresponds to the artists theoretical assumptions expressed in his work on Pure Form, which Witkacy wrote in Russia and published in 1919, already after his return to Poland. In this treatise, the artist gave, among other things, a number of formulas for juxtaposing contrasting colours and how to balance them with neutral colours – including black and white.

In the self-portrait with samovar, the artist also used another contrast, typical of his entire oeuvre. Witkacy used bright colours, not found in nature, in the portrait, where the very drawing of the face and the posing of the model betray a clear influence of traditional, academic, realistic nineteenth-century Russian portrait painting, which the artist may have studied at the time in the galleries of St. Petersburg and also Moscow. This influence can also be seen in many other portraits painted by Witkacy in Russia. All of them, however, bear a mark of the individuality of the artist, who consciously used this convention and transformed it in his own way.

The bipartite background with the samovar on the right refers to the composition of Witkacy’s oil self-portrait four years earlier. The drawing of the samovar with a teapot, simplified, with strong accents of light colours – bright yellow and warm beige – foreshadows a very similar treatment of the objects appearing in the background of the above-mentioned self-portrait of 24 July 1917. On the same day, in addition to the self-portrait, he drew, also in charcoal and pastel, an expressive fantasy composition.

As far as portraits of other people are concerned, apart from the beautiful portrait of Łucja Gruberska, the second wife of the above mentioned Władysław, two portraits of Tadeusz Miciński, with whom the artist visited the Shchukin painting collection in Moscow, and a portrait of Stefan Kiedrzyński, the spiritus movens of the Polish Theatre in St. Petersburg, should be noted. Some portraits show a way of framing the model typical of Witkacy’s later work – an expressive depiction of the head alone with a sketchily marked bust, as in the portrait of a man from 8 May 1917. Sometimes, the portraits are fabulously colourful, such as the portrait of an officer with a cigarette or the portrait of a barrister, Feliks Lewiński presented against a bright orange background contrasting with the purple backrest of the armchair and a fragment of a yellow cushion behind the model’s back. This portrait deserves special attention because, like the above-discussed self-portrait with samovar, it is a continuation of attempts to practically realise the principles of the theory of Pure Form in matters of colour, undertaken by the artist even before the war. The same is true for the above-mentioned self-portrait from 1913 in the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw containing contrasting complementary colours in the background (red and green) balanced by the black of the model’s jacket, Lewiński’s portrait is built on the contrast of orangish and cobalt blue and also complemented by black.

Станислав Игнаций Виткевич «Анна и Ярослав Ивашкевичи», 1922, источник: Музей Анны и Ярослава Ивашкевичей — Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Anna and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, 1922, photo source: The Museum of Anna and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz

The compositions of 1917 are essentially a continuation of those of the previous year, but a new theme and cycle appears – astronomical compositions. This is one of the most interesting groups of works by Witkacy related to one of his lifelong passions, which was astronomy. The stars had fascinated Witkacy since childhood. As early as 1891, his father, Stanisław Witkiewicz, wrote about his then six-year-old son:

His favourite topic of conversation is astronomy. He is ready to talk and listen for hours about the relationship of the planets and the sun.

Years later, the artist’s wife recalled:

I very much liked the evening walks when Staś talked about the stars. He knew astronomy very well; it was one of his – begun in early youth – passions, and he could talk at length about celestial phenomena. It was not a dry lecture, but just a lovely and, at the same time, scientific story.

His childhood fascination with the stars, later fostered by a thorough knowledge of astronomy, remained with Witkacy throughout his life, as evidenced by numerous references in his letters, novels, dramas and theoretical writings. However, the most striking manifestation of this was the creation in 1917-1918, during the artist’s stay in St. Petersburg, of an original series of pastel-painted astronomical compositions, a dozen of which have survived to this day. These are:

Liszka (Fox), Bliźniaki (Kastor and Polluks) (Twins (Castor and Pollux)) and Kameleon (Chameleon) (in the National Museum in Kraków), Antares w Skorpionie (Antares in Capricorn) and Nova Aurigae (in the Museum of Literature in Warsaw), Herkules z Lwem (Hercules with a Leo) in Książnica Szczecińska. In private collections are: Kozioróg (Capricornus) (USA), Kometa Encke (Comet Encke), Algorab w Kruku (Algorab in Corvus), Wieloryb i Andromeda (Cetus and Andromeda), Aldebaran i Hyady (Aldebaran and Hyades) (Warsaw). Moreover, from the catalogues of exhibitions held in January 1919 at the Kraków Society of Friends of Fine Arts and three months later at the Polish Artistic Club in Warsaw, it is known that there were more compositions; these were Wodnik (Aquarius) (known from photographs), and Plejady (Pleiades) and Procyon. In a letter to Władysław Natanson in October 1918 regarding the organisation of an exhibition of works brought from Russia, Witkacy lists five more compositions: D’Crucis (Krzyż Południowy) (Crux (Southern Cross)), Strzelec (Sagittarius), Deneb w Łabędziu (Deneb in Cygnus), Aorange (New Zealand) and Przeznaczenie (Destiny). Jadwiga Witkiewiczowa, on the other hand, writes that her husband painted all the signs of the Zodiac in Russia, which implies that at least eight more compositions were created as part of the astronomical cycle, the fate of which remains unknown.

Thumbnail — 'Portrait of Ludwik Kotulski' by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1928, photo: Culture.pl

Some of the phenomena painted by Witkacy were of interest to researchers at the astronomical observatory in Pulkovo near St. Petersburg. It seems that Witkacy’s stay in the years 1914-1918 in the close vicinity of this observatory in general, greatly influenced the creation of the series of compositions in question. Although no document testifying to the artist’s relationship with the astronomical capital of the world of that time has survived, one can assume that Witkacy’s keen and long-lasting interest in astronomy did not allow him to miss the opportunity to enrich his knowledge.

Moreover, it is known that the Pulkovo Observatory was also engaged in training Russian army officers in topography. We do not know whether Witkacy received such training as part of his officer’s course, but it is highly likely that while in St. Petersburg, he came into contact with people connected with the Pulkovo. Also noteworthy is that during the period we are interested in, Polish astronomer Leopold Matkiewicz was engaged in studying the trajectory of Encke’s comet under the direction of observatory director Oskar Backlund. Admittedly, Witkacy was familiar with the comet earlier, from Tadeusz Micinski’s Nietota. Nevertheless, the creation of a composition with this title just in 1918 in St. Petersburg and the coincidence of the subject with the research profile of the nearby observatory is probably not coincidental.

Pulkovo was also the place where the Nova in Auriga was observed and photographed. The times in which Witkacy created his compositions were a period of extraordinary flourishing of astronomical photography, which opened new possibilities for scientists. Thanks to photo-telescopes, many stars were discovered, and they also made it easier to study the movement and compare the brightness of individual objects in the sky. The artist also created works related to stars later, already after his return to Poland in mid-1918. However, they have a different character from those created in St. Petersburg.

In addition to astronomical compositions, Witkacy also created other compositions during the final period of his stay in St. Petersburg, such as the Zielone oko (Green Eye), created in January 1918. Irena Jakimowicz linked this work to the poems of Velimir Khlebnikov’s Bite and The Gul-Mullah’s Trumpet.

The Hurys composition, on the other hand, dated 14 March 1918, bears a note of the artists use of ether. This is one of two works (the other is a male portrait from 1918, in the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw) indicating that Witkacy came into contact with drugs in Russia.

At least five portraits were also created in the first half of 1918. Two of them show Witkacy’s characteristic tendency to arrange unusual situations and give them a literary context. The portrait of Łucja Gruberska, called Dzieciobójczyni (Infanticide), depicts the model bent over a teddy bear nestled in her lap while glowering at the viewer. A similar arrangement is a male portrait entitled Wściekły Hrabia (Furious Count). Even before the war, Witkacy was fond of directing life and provoked those around him to play the roles he invented. From photographic reproductions, we know of a series of portraits of his friends in various roles. In 1918, this motif returned, only to develop further. The artist continued this practice for the rest of his life, portraying various people in the most varied guises – historical outfits or theatrical costumes, turbans, strange hats, sometimes adding wings, birds’ feet or fish tails. In this way, he created a specific theatre of the imagination where he was the playwright, director and stage designer.

In fact, it is not impossible that it was in Russia that Witkacy caught the theatrical bug. At the time, one of the more serious Polish establishments in St. Petersburg was the Polish theatre run by the amateur Polish Stage Lovers’ Society. From the recollections of the actor Stefan Kiedrzyński, we know that Witkacy found refuge in the nice flat (at 12 Oficerska Street) of the great patron of this theatre and also his relative, Leon Reynel. The artist must have been fascinated by Reynel’s personality and his activities. Perhaps, the St. Petersburg experience, especially the contact with the theatrical environment there in general, created Witkacy as a playwright and theatre theorist.

It is also highly probable that some of Witkacy’s painting compositions from that period, which have not yet been interpreted, and whose author’s titles we do not yet know, may have been connected with the plays staged in St. Petersburg at the time. There is little point in forcing things to search for the influence of Russian painting on Witkacy’s art. The artist never had anything in common with the so-called avant-garde under the sign of Malevich and of the great artists he valued and imitated mainly Gauguin, whose paintings he had already seen before the war in Paris and Vienna, where he went in 1907, especially for the great posthumous exhibition of this painter.

The Russian collections of Shchukin and Morozov, which also contained Gauguin’s paintings, obviously provided an opportunity for repetition, but they were not a discovery for Witkacy. This review shows that his works from his time in Russia were a natural continuation of what he had already been creating before the war. The essential novelty lies in his discovery of the pastel, a technique in which he quite quickly became remarkably proficient. However, it is impossible to point to a specific Russian design that inspired Witkacy to use coloured pencils. It seems that this model was simply Wyspiański, but it remains a mystery why Witkacy waited so long. It could be that during the Zakopane-Kraków period, the then-budding student of the arts simply lacked the courage to compete with an artist of that format, whom he, in fact, held in high esteem.

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz's Portraits – Image Gallery

Embeded gallery style

display gallery as slider

However, matured by the nightmarish experiences of the war in St. Petersburg, where Wyspiański’s shadow no longer reached, and reality took on a new dimension, changing the scale of the pre-war problems irrevocably, Witkacy finally reached for pastels – a technique, difficult though it was, however, cheaper and much less troublesome in practice and less time-consuming than oil, and offering incomparably greater possibilities of expression than the charcoal he had used until then.

In addition, an exhibition of another outstanding pastelist, Kazimierz Stabrowski, was on show in St. Petersburg throughout November 1915. The exhibition presented his visionary-fantastic works; reviewers saw in them the influence of the most outstanding visionary artists of the early 20th century – Vrubel, Roerich and Ciurlionis; it was also noted by Echo Polskie. Witkacy certainly saw it, especially as it was discussed in the pages of this magazine by, among others, his friend and mentor from his youth, Tadeusz Miciński. It is, therefore, very possible that Stabrowski’s pastels inspired the artist to try his hand at this striking, albeit difficult, technique, at which, in time, he achieved mastery.

In mid-1918, Witkacy, with the considerable practical and financial help of Leon Reynel, returned to Poland. However, only some of his St. Petersburg adventures truly ended. The war adventure was happily over, and the adventure with the stars also ended, although the artist took up astronomical subjects several more times, but never on such a scale as in St. Petersburg. Drug experiments were continued, resulting in several hundred expressive portraits and a book published in 1932. The not fully fathomed beginnings of his theatrical adventures created an outstanding playwright whose plays are now performed all over the world. However, the adventure with pastel-drawn portraits – which began in St. Petersburg and lasted his entire life – was probably the most important for the artist personally.

Sources

Written by Anna Żakiewicz, translated by Agnieszka Mistur

_{The text comes from the exhibition catalog 'Warsaw-Moscow / Moscow-Warsaw 1900-2000', 'Zachęta' National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, December 2004.}

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