Witkacy ran a portrait company whose paintings listed the drugs behind them
The Polish painter and playwright Witkacy sold portraits in graded styles, from plain likeness to narcotic-fuelled expressionism, and scribbled on each canvas what he had taken while painting it, even if it was only coffee. His firm's motto, delivered with a straight face: the customer must always be satisfied.
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz was born in Warsaw on 24 February 1885, son of the painter and critic of the same name, with the actress Helena Modrzejewska as godmother. His father distrusted what he called the servitude of the school, so the boy was taught at home in Zakopane and urged to try every art; defying his father, he went on to the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts. His childhood friends included the future anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski.
In 1914, shattered by his fiancée's suicide, he joined Malinowski's expedition to Papua as draftsman and photographer. The war cut the trip short, the two friends quarrelled in Australia, and Witkiewicz, a Russian subject by birth, sailed from Sydney to Petrograd and became an officer. Badly wounded on the Stokhid River in July 1916, he witnessed the Russian Revolution while recovering, and claimed he had worked out his philosophy during an artillery barrage.
Back in Zakopane he theorised Pure Form in painting and theatre and wrote about forty plays between 1918 and 1925; twenty-one survive, and only one succeeded with audiences in his lifetime. After 1925 he signed himself Witkacy and launched the S.I. Witkiewicz Portrait Painting Company. His near-future novels Farewell to Autumn and Insatiability won the Golden Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature in 1935, and he championed younger writers such as Bruno Schulz.
When Germany invaded Poland he fled east to Jeziory, and after news of the Soviet invasion he took his own life on 18 September 1939. Fame came after the war: Martin Esslin treated him as a forerunner of the Theatre of the Absurd, Czesław Miłosz built The Captive Mind around Insatiability, and Tadeusz Kantor staged his plays abroad. Even his grave became absurd. Communist Poland reburied the body the Soviets handed over, unopened, in Zakopane, and genetic tests after a 1994 exhumation showed the bones belonged to an unknown woman.
Source: Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
