The Theory of Pure Form and the Mystery of Being as Unity in Plurality
Manuela Veloso

Unaware of the adaptability of such an epithet to himself, Witkiewicz once said: “[H]e surpasses every one else so much that he becomes almost nobody” (Puzyna, 1979: 38), alluding to one of his artistic mentors, Wyspianski. Witkiewicz’s upbringing has been peculiar and hermetic. He received his education at home, where there was a strong artistic and intellectual atmosphere outside public teaching institutions. Solitary and eccentric, Witkiewicz seems to have followed his father’s advice: “You won’t go along with the herd – you’ll go alone” (cf. Gerould & Kosicka, 1980: 13). As a painter, as well as a writer, he explored the dimensions of dream, madness, parody and political satire in the search for otherness. Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939) committed suicide on 18th September, the day after the German invasion of Poland.

Nowadays considered a forerunner of the happening, photo-art and body-art, Witkiewicz started his career as a painter and developed the aesthetics of Pure Form, which ultimately postulates the utter independence of the artist before nature and exterior reality. The utopia of Pure Form persisted in being Witkiewicz’s artistic and para-artistic conviction. He signed the majority of his works as Witkacy.

In 1915 Witkiewicz was a soldier of the first war. In 1918, when he returned to an independent Poland, he brought with him in his luggage, his work New Forms in Painting and the Misunderstandings Arising Therefrom (Witkiewicz, 1919), proclaiming the necessity of full emancipation from the figurative towards Pure Form. It was published one year later in Warsaw, and Witkiewicz integrated a group of painters known as Formists. Later on, he would transfer the aesthetics of Pure Form to drama, placing himself on the fringes of the arena of experimental trends in modern art and literature. In his lecture, entitled “Pure Form in the Theatre” (Witkiewicz, 1921), given at the Maly Theatre in Warshaw, Witkacy asserts that Art is the expression of “the directly given unity of our individuality in formal construction of elements”. Works of art have an autonomous construction, and it is precisely its constructional aspect that Witkiewicz calls Pure Form. Pure Form is individualized, and is not concerned with real-life feelings or intellectual concepts but with the ability to compose, construct formal wholes, with its own logic, and its own truth.