Stanislaw Witkiewicz

(Poland 1885–1939)

Jozef Jan Glogowski

(Poland 1893–1969)

Title

Fright

Other titles:

A madman's dismay

Year

1931

Media category

Photograph

Materials used

gelatin silver photograph

Dimensions

11.1 x 8.2cm image; 11.3 x 8.5cm sheet

Signature & date

Not signed. Not dated.

Credit

Purchased with funds provided by Penelope Seidler, Josef and Jeanne Lebovic, Graham and Mary Beirman, Michael Carr, Barbara Flynn and William Grounds, Paul and Becky Urla, Roslyn and Tony Oxley, The Freedman Foundation, Rhonda Rose and the Photography Collection Benefactors' Program 2001

Accession number

154.2001

Location

Not on display

Further information

Stanisław Witkiewicz made many self-portraits throughout his life in order to capture and express inner psychic states. Witkiewicz’s involvement in Formist theatre, a precursor to absurdist theatre, seems to have given a particular intensity to the way in which he depicted himself and others through photography.

Witkiewicz was born in Warsaw into a cultured Polish family who moved to Zakopane in 1890. It was here that he began writing theatrical productions and held his first exhibition of landscape paintings. In 1903 he completed the first of many texts titled ‘Dreams of an unproductive man/a metaphysical consideration’. Between 1912 and 1913 he abandoned landscape painting, taking a series of ‘metaphysical’ photographic portraits and self-portraits. Witkiewicz travelled widely and participated in an ethnological expedition to New Guinea with the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski in 1914. This trip was to impact upon his aesthetic philosophy.

After returning to Zakopane, Witkiewicz became an active member of the avant-garde painters’ group, the Formists. This period was a most productive and fertile time in terms of the artist’s creativity. It was under his initiative that the Formist Theatre was founded in Zakopane in 1925. It was during the latter part of his life that he took a series of staged photographs of himself in collaboration with Józef Jan Głogowski. Their joint photographic sessions were to produce a notable body of work. Głogowski was a non-professional photographer who had produced many portraits of his family and friends, however his photographic collaborations with Witkiewicz after 1931 are considered his best work.

Bibliography (3)

Judy Annear, Photography: Art Gallery of New South Wales Collection, 'The photograph and portraiture', pg.15-31, Sydney, 2007, 30 (illus.).

Ewa Franczak and Stefan Okolowicz, Against Nothingness: Stanislawa Ignacy Witkiewicz's Photographs, Poland, 1986, (illus.). plate 296

Galerie Berinson, Berlin, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939): photographs 2003, 2003, 11 (illus.).

Exhibition history (1)

What's in a face? aspects of portrait photography, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 24 Sep 2011–05 Feb 2012