
The journey to the East, via the Indian Ocean with a two-week stopover in Ceylon for a change of ships, opened the painters eyes to the vivid colors of nature and the different hues of human skin and offered him a glimpse of a non-Western culture that was home to business credit report Eugene a ritual theatre of metaphysical dimensions. Exposure to the colonial world of the British empire with its inferior subject business credit report Eugene peoples had a profound impact on Witkacys understanding of power structures and the nature of otherness, leading him to write a group of plays set in the tropics that drew upon his own travel experiences conflated with his reading of Joseph Conrad, another former Pole turned Anglo like Malinowski. For Witkacy the business credit report Eugene imperialist system of domination found its microcosm in the paternalistic family where the father constantly browbeat his offspring in the name of their own self-improvement. Upon the outbreak of World War I, two weeks after arriving in Australia, Witkacy volunteered for military service in the Russian Army, despite the fact that as an only son he was exempt from conscription. Even though Witkacy felt that he was defending Poland against the Germans, his decision to fight in support of the Czarist empire was deeply upsetting to his father, who died in 1915, without ever seeing his son again. free credit report card Witkacy underwent a metamorphosis as the result of his experiences in Russia, where after completing officers training school he was commissioned second lieutenant. Calm, almost joyful, he holds himself straight with his head raised high, an aunt in Petrograd wrote to his mother; he has completely shaken off the despairing state of apathy in which we first saw him when he arrived. Sent with his regiment to the Eastern front, Witkacy was seriously wounded in 1916 and decorated for bravery. On convalescent leave for the rest of the war, he experienced the final days of the Russian Empire in Petrograd and witnessed both the February and October Revolutions at close hand. All the while he painted actively and was introduced to narcotics, orgies, and other decadent pastimes by the white Russian aristocracy in its death throes. At one point Witkacy thought of joining the Polish Legions that were then being formed in Russia after the fall of the Romanovs in anticipation of Polands gaining its independence. a credit report Before returning to independent Poland in July business credit report Eugene 1918 with a heavy load of his paintings and portraits, he spent eight uneasy months in post-revolutionary Russia. This was a period of his life about which the playwright talked only enigmatically. As a former Czarist officer, his life business credit report Eugene was constantly at risk, and he lived in fear of the Bolsheviks from then on.
From 1918 until his death in 1939, Witkacy lived in Zakopane, painting compositions in oils as a member of the vanguard group of artists called Formists, while earning his living as a portraitist (in pastels) and business credit report Eugene writing prolifically in many genres. He traveled throughout Poland by train pursuing commissions for portraits, but never went abroad again. The rest of his life was largely consumed by a routine of hard work both as the old portrait-painting prostitute (his own words) and as a highly disciplined creative artist and thinker.
The impetus for Witkacys torrential creative outpouring in the 1920s was concentrated in the adventures and traumas of the business credit report Eugene previous decade. In short order he had business credit report Eugene been exposed to Freudian psychoanalysis, imperialism and colonialism, cultural anthropology, non-Western civilization, war, revolution, and communismfundamental twentieth-century ideologies, viewpoints, business credit report Eugene and experiences that soon became woven into the texture of his dramas. free three credit report Paradoxically, Witkacys theory of the theatrePure Formasserts that the experiential, discursive content of drama is of only incidental significance and that the sole element of enduring value is the formal, which alone creates the metaphysical feelings that are the goal of art, Artistic practice, he felt, business credit report Eugene should find its basis in theoretical principles.
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