Witold Wojtkiewicz

Witold Wojtkiewicz , painter Polish (December 29th 1879, Warsaw - June 14th 1909, Warsaw) is a representative of the Young person Poland, figure of the Art nouveau in this country. But its oneiric and personal work actually places it at cross several currents.

Biography

Witold Wojtkiewicz is reached of a serious cardiac weakness to its birth in 1879. It grows in an large family where the father is bank clerk. Against the opinion of this last, it starts as of 1897 artistic studies: it is formed in the class of drawing of Wojciech Gerson to Warsaw. It starts by carrying out portraits of pupils of its entourage, then collaborates in satirical reviews (the weekly magazine Kolce , later the semi-monthly Liberum Veto ).

After a short passage to Saint-Pétersbourg, time to discover that the atmosphere of the city is not appropriate to him, it settles in 1903 with Cracow where it manages to find his place within the Polish artistic company. While continuing its studies in the Art schools, it in particular become acquainted there with Stanislas Parenski, doctor art lover, and various intellectuals of which it makes the portrait. Wojtkiewicz manages to give a real depth to these middle-class tables while letting show through the heart of the characters whom it paints.

Not very known in France, Wojtkiewicz is discovered by André Gide which falls on some from its fabrics at the time of a voyage to Berlin in 1907. Enthusiastic, Gide invites it to expose to the Druet Gallery: it will be the only French exposure of the artist, who dies two years later of an heart attack, to the thirty years age.

Work

Wojtkiewicz is located at cross symbolism and Expressionnisme. Its work maintains the strong bonds with these two currents of which he is the contemporary, and present parallels with the poetic and literary concerns of its time. It is also impressed references to the Conte S and popular Légende S of Poland.

Work of Wojtkiewicz, which dissects the company of its time on the mode of the psychological portrait or the caricature, comprises at the same time a dimension strange, unreal, even fantastic definitely assumed, as in the Portait of Boleslaw Raczynski musician of 1905.

Its populated cycles of 1908 puppets, of pierrots, clowns and child-old men are known for the universe melancholic person and mysterious which they set up: through scenes of circus and plays enigmatic, Wojtkiewicz gives a phantasmagoric interpretation and distressing existence. The fabrics of Wojtkiewicz, Gide writing when he discovers them in 1907, “lit this a little dark room, not by the glare of tons (...) but by an odd agreement of the reports/ratios, the painful imagination of the drawing, interpretation moved and quasi pathetic of the color. ”

The realistic and tormented painting of Wojtkiewicz was compared with that Otto Ten and of Francisco Goya.

Principal work

One distinguishes four major cycle sets of themes in work from Wojtkiewicz:

Szkice tragikomiczne ( tragi-comic Sketches , 1903 - 1904)
Cyrki ( Circus , 1905 - 1907)
Monomanie ( Monomanies , 1906)
Ceremony ( Ceremonies , 1908, unfinished)

External bonds

Witold Wojtkiewicz Article of Irena Kossowska on the site of the Institute Adam Mickiewicz, 2002
virtual Gallery

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