Painter and theoretician
He belonged to the group of artists who most strongly influenced the history of Polish art at the end of the nineteenth century. His writings also left their mark on Polish social thought at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He was well known and highly regarded as a moralist, undertaking issues connected with religion, ethics and national identity. The name of Witkiewicz is associated with the figure of an outstanding critic and theoretician of art, a painter, a draughtsman and the author of architectural designs who fought for a breakthrough in Polish art which was, in the European context, backward, provincial and dominated by literary contents and conventionalised means of expression of an academic provenance. Being an advocate of realism in the visual arts, Witkiewicz became at the same time "the spokesman for the Zakopane style" in architecture and the designer of objects of daily use referring to the Podhale patterns. It is not possible to ignore his services as the father and mentor of another outstanding artist, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), who, in confrontation with the views of the "old" Witkiewicz, created his own artistic vision, completely different from that of his father.
Witkiewicz's painting oeuvre played a less significant role in the history of Polish art than his theoretical reflections. A whole series of the paintings that he created, however, evades unambiguous classification and astounds us by simultaneously belonging to several artistic trends. In a surprising way, the most outstanding of his paintings combine within themselves a Romantic mood with a naturalist workshop and a symbolist perception of the two-dimensionality of the world, showing at the same time both its material and its spiritual nature.
The name of Witkiewicz has always been linked with the Munich circle, with a strong influence of the realistic trend using the formula elaborated by Maksymilian Gierymski and Józef Chełmoński. An enormous influence on the shaping of his ethical and aesthetic attitudes was exerted by Adam Chmielowski, who aroused in him the passion of a polemicist and a talent pronouncing the objective judgements of his mentor. He also confirmed him in the conviction about the faulty academic system of teaching, which imposed on artists lifeless rules and stiff aesthetic conventions.
Thematically, Witkiewicz's creative work concentrated on landscape, particularly on his native landscape (which is significant), but in its early phase it embraced also genre scenes, as befits the experience of a Munich painter (At Pasture, 1875; Narrow Gateway, 1877; Before the Tavern, 1878) and portraits (Musician, c. 1877; Portrait of Ignacy Witkiewicz on Horseback, 1880). Markets, taverns, hunting, funerals and ploughing constitute the iconography typical of the young Witkiewicz's painting. Among the more interesting scenes taking place in the countryside is the painting At the Fair (1882), which is distinguished by the randomness of the framing of the scene, the crowd of peasants engaged in trading and the variety of the poses, gestures and expressions of the figures. What is significant in realistic painting is the meticulous recreation of architectural details, attire and objects on the market stalls. The illustration activity during the period of cooperation with "Wędrowiec" gave Witkiewicz the idea of documenting the everyday life of Warsaw and showing the real face of the city.
This is a statement by Witkiewicz the naturalist; apart, however, from his desire to recreate faithfully the realities of everyday life at the beginning of the 1880s, he was also directed by the desire to depict the recent past, Poland's contemporary history. The artist, following in the footsteps of Maksymilian Gierymski, presented in several compositions episodes from the 1863 rising. He chose, as had Max Gierymski, dramatic but not heroic extracts from the national epic, everyday events taking place on the margins of great events, battles, fights and skirmishes. The composition of A Wounded Insurgent is characterised by an extended anecdote divided into several roles, presenting the various psychological reactions of the participants in an event - the carrying of a wounded insurgent brought by some of his battle comrades into a country cottage. Here can be seen the attachment of Witkiewicz the naturalist to details, particularly of attire and buildings; here there is the expression of thorough observation of a grey and poor landscape.
In the field of portrait art, the closest to the aesthetic principles of Witkiewicz, the theoretician of realism, was Portrait of Wojciech Roj (1900), veristically recreating the physiognomic features of the highlander, blunt in character, arising from the tradition of painting of Piotr Michałowski. In Sztuka i Krytyka (Art and Criticism), Witkiewicz defined in this way the properties of the naturalistic, psychologically deepened, painterly image:
The character of a given face is constituted by its shape and colour. The forehead, nose, eyes, lips, chin, not only by their shape, express the given individuality, their colour in almost equal measure affects the expression of the face, just as colour changes appropriately to various emotional stirrings. The presentation, with the help of the means of the painterly art, of this individual character with all of its properties is the task of a portrait. This means the recreation of a given known person and not some ideal average human type. [...] observation of the face, concentrating all one's attention on it [...] means that the surroundings of the person, some equipment, small details of attire etc. either completely escape our attention or are seen in the most general and least clear forms. So, that which in real life happens with the help of the natural logic of the activity of the human mind - in the fictitious world of art the painter has to impose on the viewer, force him to see within the frame of the painting only the given person, to observe his face and not to have his attention distracted by any incidental details.
The starting point for Witkiewicz's aesthetic revolution was the attack on the cult of historical painting, which was situated highest in the hierarchy of academic painterly genres. The shafts of his criticism were aimed by Witkiewicz initially at the outstanding figure of Polish historical painting, Jan Matejko, who was seen not so much as the author of perfectly directed costume scenes recreating historical realities but as the creator of fatherland historiosophy and patriotic iconography and also in other publications, the critic showed that it is not a great subject and artistic narration read in the context of a literary text or historical documentation that constitutes the artistic value of a painting but its aesthetic values independent of extra-artistic premises. The foundation arising from the positivist world-view of Witkiewicz's aesthetic theory was "not what, but how", and at the head of painterly tasks was the postulate "the harmony of colours and the logic of chiaroscuro".
Striving for a limiting of the narrational aspect of visual arts, the artist concentrated on the painting of landscapes; he painted many, including Czarny Staw (1891), A forest (1892), Crocuses Against the Background of Snow-Clad Mountains (1897), Blossoming Apple-Trees (1899), Lake with Water-Lilies (1901), Spring Landscape With a Tarn (1902), Young Birches (1904), Crocuses and Marsh Marigolds (1907). In the Tatra mountains, enchanted by the enormity of the forces of nature, overwhelmed by the majesty of the mountains, fascinated by the raw beauty of the rocks and the changeability of atmospheric phenomena, Witkiewicz painted his most expressive paintings, paintings on the borders of realism, naturalism and symbolism, capturing the realities of nature and at the same time evoking an uncommon mood, an atmosphere of expectation, sometimes of terror, mental tension and anxiety before something unknown and unforeseeable. Such an aura emanated from the paintings by those Romantics trying to transmit by use of a painterly language the spirituality of nature; a similar mood was created by the symbolists seeking artistic equivalents for the spiritual element permeating the universe. The attitude of a naturalist dispassionately analysing tangible reality became transformed unnoticeably in Witkiewicz's painting into the attitude of a neo-Romantic, a pantheist striving to convey the spiritual dimension of the universum.
The period spent in Zakopane was the time of Witkiewicz's ideological metamorphosis, the time of unlimited fascination with the native landscape and the Podhale folklore, the time of the strengthening of faith in the cultural identity of the nation as seen in folk art. This was also a period of revision of earlier aesthetic assessments. Eagerly seeking testimonies of Polishness in art, Witkiewicz wrote about Matejko in 1908 in a new spirit:
Matejko came from a generation and from times in which human souls blazed like in a volcano with great desires, immeasurable hope and equally immeasurable despair, and he felt this in a great and profound way and passed through human souls, rousing them to the highest summits of feelings, increasing them, in this way fulfilling the mission which, before him, had been fulfilled by the great poets.
This diametrical change in Witkiewicz's attitudes was most effectively summarised by Żeromski in his lecture, "Literature and Polish life". The ideological transformations soon found expression in the morphological structure of his paintings, in their luministic values, colouristic range, compositional frame, brush stroke and texture. Stylistically, Witkiewicz began to approach, involuntarily and unknowingly, the art of Polish modernists, like Chełmoński, increasingly synthesising forms and making unreal, in accordance with his own impression, the shapes and colours of nature in order to extract its spiritual essence. The indirect link in departing from positivist objectivism was his admiration for the luminous values of the landscapes by Corot, who was the precursor of French realism and at the same time a painter-poet immersing the landscapes painted in a silver-grey sfumato.
The attribution by Witkiewicz of the fundamental role in painting to light and colour, inseparably connected with light, directed his attention towards impressionism. The artist admittedly did not adapt the pointillist technique but carefully followed the changeability of colour tones depending on the lighting; he also observed the accidental method of framing, strongly emphasised in the canvases of the impressionists, and the highly raised (Cloud, 1899-1900) or radically lowered (Morskie Oko) point of observation - compositional tricks borrowed from Japanese woodcuts. The "Japanising" frame appearing in some of Witkiewicz's paintings (The Forest Wilderness, 1893; A Snow-Cap in The Sunlight) is proof of the relationship between his painterly search and the modernistic aesthetics assimilating the Japanese models consistently promoted in Polish artistic circles by Feliks Manggha-Jasieński, a collector of Japanese art. What seemed close to the Young Poland symbolists, particularly to Ruszczyc, was the fragmentary views of a forest interior with a stream breaking through the tangle of vegetation, painted freely, summarily, in places impasto (A Brook in a Forest, before 1894).
Witkiewicz was linked with the Young Poland trend also owing to his love of nocturnes, which had another, even deeper, root, because it was from Munich (Stimmung painting). The darkness embracing the landscapes (Ukrainian Night, 1895; Dusk, 1898) served to heighten the mood just as well as the mists enveloping numerous landscapes (Spring Fog, 1893; Sheep in a Fog, 1899-1900). A convenient field for an analysis of luministic effects was for Witkiewicz marine landscapes, a series of which appeared in 1885-1886 in Połąga. Observed at different times of the day and in various atmospheric conditions, the sea was at one time dangerously frenzied, at other times slightly agitated and then as smooth as the surface of a lake, and it sparkled with the reflections of the sun, shone with the rose of twilight or reflected the white light of the moon (A View of the Baltic Sea at Połąga, 1885). The study of the shining of the water surface, lightly creased by the wind and coloured bronze from the slopes reflected in it, can also be seen in Czarny Staw - Snowstorm (1892).
The mountain landscapes became for Witkiewicz the area for becoming acquainted with the essence of nature and for penetrating its spiritual dimension. Nobody painted the Polish Tatra mountains like Witkiewicz! Among his most interesting Tatra paintings is An Autumn Scene (1894), a composition in which the artist confronted the enormity of the mountainous space, the power of the summits and the strength of the closed wall of the forest with the fragility of human existence. As in the paintings of the Romantics, the small figures of the male and female highlanders leading the flock of sheep are lost in the snow-swept landscape and at the same time constitute an important element of it; the reflections of the lantern carried by the young shepherd introduce into the composition a powerful luministic effect; the red of the girl's highland shawl brings a strong tone among the whites, greys and blues of the stretches of snow.
Among the masterpieces painted by Witkiewicz is Föhn Wind (1895), in which the darkened sky, the clumps of clouds devouring the mountain summits and two solitary trees bending under the onslaught of the most powerful of Tatra winds suggestively convey the terror of the moment and the power of the unbridled element. The description from the collection of tales by Witkiewicz entitled Na Przełęczy (On the Mountain Pass) can be considered a self-written commentary to the painting:
Above Giewont there billows a huge bank of clouds, spilling with desperate compulsion into the dark depths of the valleys, the moon shines from behind the falling fog then fades, looms in the light and twilight; in the torn clumps of clouds, on the black blue of the sky there flicker frightened stars. The moving darkness writhes in the forests and flies with the shadows of the clouds along the snow, lying ponderously in the light dimmed by the half-lights of violet gauze. Somewhere a brook sparkles in the light of the moon and a pair of spruces, torn by the storm, bends, struggles, leans towards the earth and sways in desperate impotence.
The theatre of the Tatra mountains, sunk in the darkness of night or steeped in glorious sunlight, remained a permanent motif in Witkiewicz's painting until 1908. A Winter Landscape in the Tatra Mountains, painted in that year, is the most astonishing work by the artist - the painting breaks the barriers between artistic trends, realism and symbolism, and anticipates the tendencies of "magical realism". The sharpness of seeing the snow-clad summit, the boulders lying at its foot and the frozen waterfall can here be explained by the clarity of the icy air; the violent contrast of the parts illuminated by moonlight and those engulfed in darkness can also be empirically explained. In the context of the artistic tradition, the asymmetrical frame seems to be borrowed from impressionist paintings, which were the culmination of the naturalistic trend.
Nothing, however, can explain the poetics of obliqueness and the aura of uncanniness which this painting evokes. Also, the radical narrowing of the range of colours to a blue-streaked white and blue broken by black is not here an obvious result of the direct observation of nature; the tone of the blue impeccably binds the opposing poles of black and white and gives the painting a visionary dimension. This is a step in the direction of making unreal the observed section of the landscape, a painterly transformation serving aims different from an objective recording of natural phenomena; this is an attempt to subordinate sensual cognition to intuition, which reaches the essence of things, the spiritual essence of nature.
Witkiewicz achieved the surprising visual effects based on the profound experience of contact with nature also in several earlier Tatra paintings, such as A Female Chamois in the Mountains (before 1896) and A Tatra View - the Nest of Winter (1906-1907). The subtle colourist nuances of the layers of snow covering the rocks and of the clouds enveloping the summits and the shiny white of the mountainsides illuminated by the sun contrasted with the blue dominating in the shade are the constituent features of these paintings of winter; and also the originality of the frame, its fragmentary nature, spatial depth and the highly raised observation point. In some sense these paintings anticipate the concept of the "strangeness of existence", which many years later will be announced by the artist's son, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz.
In the Zakopane period, Witkiewicz's attitudes towards the social and national role of art matured. The monograph article on Juliusz Kossak from 1889 was already full of considerations on the "tribal character and spirit" of art. In Zakopane, the critic became aware of the relationship between his actions and the activity of the great reformers of thinking about art - Morris, Ruskin and Norwid. His struggle for the "Polishness of our culture" began with the discovery of Podhale art. The art that developed from popular tradition was meant, in his opinion, to create bonds of national solidarity and to break down class distinctions. Witkiewicz's designs in the field of the applied arts embraced all elements of interior decoration and were effected using various techniques and materials and included both altars, church chalices and candle-holders and suites of furniture, individual sideboards, shelves, chairs and armchairs, wooden chests, bowls, plates and cutlery, metal coffee services, salt cellars, brooches and pendants, ceramic tea and coffee services, butter dishes and ladles, and even serviettes and curtains.
Witkiewicz's first monographic art exhibition was held in 1927 in Warsaw's Zachęta Fine Arts Society. A retrospective exhibition of the artist's work was organised by the Dr Tytus Chałubiński Tatra Museum in Zakopane in 1996.
