Stanisław Witkiewicz

Stanisław Witkiewicz (8 May 1851 in Pašiaušė – 5 September 1915 in Lovran) was a Polish painter, architect, writer and art theoretician.

Witkiewicz (lithuanian Vitkevičius) was born in the Lithuanian village of Pašiaušė (Polish: Poszawsze) in Samogitia, at that time, in the partitioned Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth lands ruled by the Russian Empire.

Villa Konstantynówka in Zakopane. Joseph Conrad stayed there in 1914

Witkiewicz studied in Saint Petersburg, 1869–71, then in Munich, 1872–75.

He created the Zakopane Style (styl zakopiański) (also known as Witkiewicz Style (styl witkiewiczowski)) in architecture. He was strongly associated with Zakopane and promoted it in the art community.

His son, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, became a famous painter, playwright, novelist and philosopher, also known (from the conflation of his surname and middle name) by the pseudonym "Witkacy." The son's godmother was the internationally famous actress Helena Modjeska, whom the elder Witkiewicz in 1876 had nearly accompanied to California in the United States.

Witkiewicz had strong views against formal education: "school is completely at odds with the psychological make-up of human beings". He applied this principle in his son's upbringing and was disappointed when the 20-year-old Witkacy chose to enroll at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków.

In 1908, suffering from tuberculosis, the elder Witkiewicz left his family in Zakopane and relocated to Lovranno, a fashionable resort in what was then Austria-Hungary, which today is in Croatia. He died there in 1915.