Witkacy: An Album of Photos a Bundle of Letters

WITKACY AN ALBUM OF PHOTOS A BUNDLE OF LETTERS Translated by Daniel Gerould and Jadwiga Kosicka Playwright, painter, aesthetician, philosopher, Stanisfaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939) was also a pioneering photographer. Recent exhibitions of his works in Poland and Western Europe have acquainted large audiences with this hitherto little known aspect of his creative genius. Presences Polonaises, shown at the Centre Georges Pompidou from June 23 to September 26, 1983, was in large part a tribute to Witkacy (the artist's pen name by which he was known to friends and admirers), and over 150 of his photographs were on display. Witkacy created his own private theatre with a camera. He produced a long series of photographic portraits of himself and his many alter egos, his family and friends, and his surroundings. Whether he composes the picture or is himself the subject of the composition, Witkacy is the artist-director probing the limits of self, discovering new identities, relishing the lying masks, yet penetrating to the unfathomable individual beneath. As a boy Witkacy learned from his father (an important turn-of-the-century artistic personality and cultural critic) the value of photography in the development of his creative work; he was encouraged to pose and play in front of the camera. He began his career as a photographer in 1899-1900 by taking many pictures of locomotives; a quarter of a century later he would write one of his best plays, The Crazy Locomotive, on this childhood theme. Next he photographed the natural surroundings of his mountain hometown, Zakopane, in the south of Poland, and then came to what would be his true subject, the human face. Witkacy's photographic portraits and autoportraits are psychic studies, 59 revelations of the inner man, showing the inevitable gulf between people and the existential incommunicability of feelings. Witkacy was obsessed with faces ("mugs" he called them), particularly the eyes; in his plays features are described in precise detail. In his photographs before 1914 the face often fills the entire picture and is both the foreground and the background. Two sides of the individual are given prominence in Witkacy's photographic portraits. There are social masks and camouflage of the theatricalized photos; in this world of lies and the absurd, where one plays endless roles in a comedy, there is no abiding self, only play, theatre, inauthenticity. From the disintegration of the self schizophrenic doubles and deceptive personalities arise. Witkacy's series of "faces" and staged paratheatrical scenes-actually photographed by his friend J6zef Gtogowski-are the flamboyant expression of this outer drama. The other side of Witkacy's photographic exploration of the psyche is the anxiety, dread, and terror of the individual in the face of existence-the suffering that lies behind the mask. Here the eyes are the conduit to the inner man or woman. In many of his photographic autoWitkacies, the artist caught the look of incipient madness in his own haunted eyes. He kept photographing himself throughout his life, keeping various albums and collections arranged by kind, also photographing his own paintings and keeping them in albums. Totally rejected by the art and theatre establishment of his day, Witkacy created his own museum in his home and staged his own mini-dramas with his camera. Witkacy's letters give another portrait of the artist engaged in battle with existence, trying somehow to survive. These letters, quite without any literary affectation, seem written out of desperate need and give a picture of someone immensely vulnerable, full of insecurities and fears. Offered here is a representative sampling of letters to parents, friends, editor, artistic collaborators, wife, and admired master. A protean self, constantly dissolving into nothingness, Witkacy adopts a variety of tones of voice (the verbal equivalent of his "faces") depending on the recipient of the letter. With his world famous and successful friend Malinowski, he is ironic and sarcastically self-depreciating; with the German philosopher, Cornelius -like Witkacy a painter as well as a thinker little recognized by his compatriots-he is almost abjectly servile and admiring, finding a father and hero he can worship. And beyond the grimaces and poses of these letters , there is the naked self, full of horror...