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The Portrait Looking Back: The Game of the Gaze in Witkacy’s Portraits
Stanush, Natalia Barbara
Stanush, Natalia Barbara
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Abstract
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939), better known by the pseudonym Witkacy, was a Polish painter, photographer, playwright, novelist, philosopher, and art theoretician. This thesis focuses on one phase of Witkacy’s career, the portraiture he made starting in 1925. In that year, Witkacy set up the “S. I. Witkiewicz Portrait Firm,” which produced only pastel portraits. The Portrait Firm became Witkacy’s major occupation and source of income. Besides calling his one-artist studio a “firm,” Witkacy whimsically took on the nomenclature of corporate business and sold portraits as if they were commercial products. Witkacy put out a menulike “Rulebook,” which functioned as a ‘contract’ between Witkacy and his ‘client’/sitter, and from which sitters could order portrait types. This thesis analyzes how central to Witkacy’s Firm was the game with the portrait’s and viewer’s gaze. This first chapter analyzes Witkacy’s portraits in terms of how he handles the gaze of the portrait itself as well as the gaze of the viewer. Looking at four of Witkacy’s portraits, this chapter argues that the artist rejects the traditional practice of making the sitter the primary object of scrutiny. Witkacy introduces a challenging and reciprocal gaze to his portraits. This chapter also analyzes Witkacy’s annotations, which he included on the surfaces of his portraits. On a formal level, the annotations function as ‘spacing’ of vision and as a disturbance in the perpetual field. As writing, the annotations seem to float above the figures in the portrait, as if they were explanatory mediators between the viewer and the image. The second chapter focuses on annotations and signatures which appear on Witkacy’s portraits in comparison to the practices of Marcel Duchamp, looking at how both artists humorously and ironically included written language in their works. The chapter examines how they both use their signature as a complex trope and as a ‘shifter’ to indicate and question the presence and the role of the artist in a work of art, as well as to question the basic assumptions of authorship and signature as a commodity. The last chapter analyzes Witkacy’s Portrait Firm in light of the recurring themes of the standardization of art under the bourgeoise. It also discusses how Witkacy’s strategy in his Portrait Firm, combined with the issue of the gaze and his understanding of art, might suggest a different answer to avant-garde debates on ‘the end of art,’ in particular to Duchamp’s and Dada’s approaches to this question.
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Thesis (B.A. in Art History and Communications)--John Cabot University, Fall 2020.
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2020
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Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1885-1939
Citation
Stanush, Natalia Barbara. "The Portrait Looking Back: The Game of the Gaze in Witkacy’s Portraits". BA Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2020.