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DOI Artikel:Jakimowicz, Irena: Metaphor and Realism: Witkacy's Late Works in the National Museum's Collection. 1984 Acquisitions
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.18901#0093
Irena Jakimoivicz
METAPHOR AND REALISM
WITKACY’S LATE WORKS IN THE NATIONAL
MUSEUM’S COLLECTION. 1984 ACQUISITIONS
In 1938, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz was in his early fifties. Not only was he turning grey,
but something was beginning to fail in the body of this well-formed, strikingly handsome man.
He felt tired and enervate. Theories of the catastrophic future seemed to have materialized,
which made daily inconveniences acuter and absurd in their irrevocability, and which stimulated
the imagination. His letters to his friends reveal a keen pain of existence combined with recur-
ring suicidal thoughts. At that time, i.e. in the late 1930s, an obsessive motif of destruction,
ruins of castles or factories with chimneys still smoking, returned in the background of the por-
traits he painted. One has an impression that the presence of this particular iconographie motif,
more frequent in his drawings from different periods, is no accident, and neither is it strictly
related to the given model. Though the ruins in Witkacy’s portraits may be interpreted as
a mataphor of the condition of contemporary man, whom Witkacy describes in one of his literary
texts as a bankrupt tourist amidst ruins, a different interpretetion is also possible. They may
be a sign of the artist’s own hesitation and failure. Ruins first appeared in the background of
Witkacy’s portraits in 1924. It would not be ungrounded to attribute them to his war experience,
yet the date, 1924, which was when Witkacy abandoned painting in the Pure Form and lit
the Convict’s Last Cigarette (the title of one of his selfportraits) indicates that war symbolism
might have helped the artist describe his state of mind and acknowledge his failure. In the por-
traits of other people, this symbolism apparently brings out the dramatic or even disturbing
message; sometimes it acts as a conventional accompaniment to the conventional tears shed
by the sitters.
79
METAPHOR AND REALISM
WITKACY’S LATE WORKS IN THE NATIONAL
MUSEUM’S COLLECTION. 1984 ACQUISITIONS
In 1938, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz was in his early fifties. Not only was he turning grey,
but something was beginning to fail in the body of this well-formed, strikingly handsome man.
He felt tired and enervate. Theories of the catastrophic future seemed to have materialized,
which made daily inconveniences acuter and absurd in their irrevocability, and which stimulated
the imagination. His letters to his friends reveal a keen pain of existence combined with recur-
ring suicidal thoughts. At that time, i.e. in the late 1930s, an obsessive motif of destruction,
ruins of castles or factories with chimneys still smoking, returned in the background of the por-
traits he painted. One has an impression that the presence of this particular iconographie motif,
more frequent in his drawings from different periods, is no accident, and neither is it strictly
related to the given model. Though the ruins in Witkacy’s portraits may be interpreted as
a mataphor of the condition of contemporary man, whom Witkacy describes in one of his literary
texts as a bankrupt tourist amidst ruins, a different interpretetion is also possible. They may
be a sign of the artist’s own hesitation and failure. Ruins first appeared in the background of
Witkacy’s portraits in 1924. It would not be ungrounded to attribute them to his war experience,
yet the date, 1924, which was when Witkacy abandoned painting in the Pure Form and lit
the Convict’s Last Cigarette (the title of one of his selfportraits) indicates that war symbolism
might have helped the artist describe his state of mind and acknowledge his failure. In the por-
traits of other people, this symbolism apparently brings out the dramatic or even disturbing
message; sometimes it acts as a conventional accompaniment to the conventional tears shed
by the sitters.
79