Tadeus Langier, Zakopane

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz

1912–13 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

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.

Artist

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz

Date

1912–13

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gilman Collection, Purchase, Denise and Andrew Saul Gift, 2005