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Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz: The Increase and Excess of Facial Expression

2023; Springer International Publishing; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-031-36899-8_2

2730-9193

Teresa Bruś,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

The chapter addresses photographic portraits and self-portraits by the Polish artist Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy). In his experimental explorations of images of the face in diverse media—in photographic portraits, in painted portraiture as well as in verbal acts of portraiture—Witkiewicz provokes questions about the properties and values of the image of the face, especially when that image is multiplied, phased, and serialized. In the interwar period, Witkiewicz’s intense practice of photographing the face sets off new chains of significations, exposing for the viewer the face in fragments, the spectral face without contours, the tragic and grotesque face. As an astoundingly self-creative auto-photographer and portraitist, Witkiewicz is preeminent. Sceptical about emergent modernist movements, Witkiewicz creates faces which anticipate the use of extreme close-up techniques by acclaimed modernists, but also presage uses of the close-up as a technical precondition for a new vocabulary of facial expressions and facial erasure.