This ragged, provincial theatre is a kind of existential metaphor for Wojtkiewicz. In a tragicomic farce bordering between a dream and a gutter theatre, he discovers the truth about people’s lives. They resemble jesters and unconscious puppets helplessly throwing their wooden limbs.
The main breakthrough in the painting Circus - In Front of a Miniature Theatre is Wojtkiewicz’s departure from the ad hoc character of the early Tragicomic Sketches. Although the formal foundations of Wojtkiewicz’s art were shaped quite quickly, the co-creator of Green Balloon initially became known as a snarky satirist and a skilful commentator on political and moral realities. In circus performances, satire gives way to the pure grotesque of an universal, existential shade. An anecdote transforms into a metaphorical delusion.
A group of circus performances was created in the years 1905-1907. They do not form a series, but similarly to other works by Wojtkiewicz, they are connected by the same theme. The circus motif appeared during this period in oil paintings as well as in lithographs, watercolours, and tempera. It is also a transitional element from the dominance of oil technique to tempera – it was with the use of tempera, shrouding the brighter, more luminous canvases in a whitish, matte mist, that Witkiewicz painted his last paintings.
The belief that puppets are much better suited to depict existential archetypes than living people linked the Polish painter with Maurice Maeterlinck. It is possible that the Belgian playwright had a direct influence on him, as his deeply pessimistic dramas from the 1880s and 1890s were staged in Kraków, where the young painter could have seen at least some of them. However, before the creation of Circus, dating from 1906-1907, he could not see the paintings of another Belgian, James Ensor, with whom, due to his convergence of interests, including the motif of the mask, he was juxtaposed many times. At the same time, Wojtkiewicz’s mask gains a more dramatic overtone than in Ensor’s moralising canvases. As Wiesław Juszczak noted, for Ensor, a mask was a symbol of human falsehood, hypocrisy, a prop in the morality letter. In Wojtkiewicz’s case, it is a tool of dehumanisation – a mask is a preliminary stage of the clown’s transformation into a puppet.