Polish · 1885–1939
Witkacy was raised by a painter father who refused to send him to school on principle, went to Australia and New Guinea in 1914 with his friend the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, quarrelled with him, and then — as a Russian subject — took a commission in the Tsar's Pavlovsky Regiment, was wounded, and watched the February Revolution from Petersburg. He came back to Poland convinced that European civilisation was finished and that art would be replaced by a comfortable, well-fed collectivism in which nobody felt anything. He wrote around forty plays, several novels, a theory of Pure Form, and a body of philosophy, ran a portrait studio where clients could specify which drugs the artist should take before painting them, and photographed himself obsessively. On 18 September 1939, hearing that the Red Army had crossed the border, he walked into a wood near Jeziory and cut his wrists.