Tadeus Langier, Zakopane
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz Polish
Not on view
Witkiewicz is a legendary figure in Polish cultural history not only for his multifaceted talent but also for his bohemian lifestyle and eccentric personality. A prolific painter and photographer, dramatist, and philosopher, he made hundreds of self-portraits, sketches, paintings, and studies of friends characterized by a searing self-scrutiny and existential anguish. Taken with a view camera-its lens extended by a drainpipe-this portrait of his colleague Tadeusz Langier is characteristic of the searching photographic studies he made between 1912 and 1914, a period culminating in the suicide of his fiancée. Witkiewicz himself took his own life on the eve of World War II, the day the Red Army invaded eastern Poland.
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