The Polish Artist Stanisław Witkiewicz Made Portraits Whereas On Completely different Psychoactive Medicine, and Famous the Medicine on Every Portray

At the very least as soon as a day, employees at artwork museums and galleries worldwide should hear somebody say, “the artist should have been on medication.” It’s the simplest clarification for artwork that disturbs, unsettles, confounds our expectations of what artwork needs to be. Possibly typically artists are on medication. (R. Crumb tells the story of discovering his inimitable fashion whereas on acid.) However possibly it’s not the medication that make their artwork appear otherworldly. Possibly mind-altering substances make them extra receptive to the supply of creativity….

In any case, artists have lengthy used psychoactive substances to achieve greater states of consciousness and deal with a world that doesn’t get their imaginative and prescient. Within the early days of LSD experimentation, one psychiatrist even examined the phenomenon. UC Irvine’s Oscar Janiger dosed volunteer topics at a rented L.A. home, then had them draw or in any other case document their experiences. He in the end aimed to make a “creativity capsule,” testing tons of of prepared topics between 1954 and 1962.

Had Polish artist Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939) — who glided by “Witkacy” — lived to see the unfold of LSD, he would have signed up for each trial. Extra seemingly, he would have carried out his personal experiments, with himself as the only real take a look at topic. The Warsaw-born artist, author, thinker, novelist, and photographer died in 1939, the 12 months after Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman by chance synthesized acid. All through his profession, nonetheless, Witkacy experimented with nearly each different psychoactive substance, anticipating Janiger by many years along with his portraits — painted whereas… sure… he was on a lot of medication.

In contrast to his up to date Dalí, Witkacy didn’t declare to be medication. However he was hardly coy about their use. He made notes on every portray to point his state of intoxication. “Beneath the affect of cocaine, mescaline, alcohol, and different narcotic cocktails,” Juliette Bretan writes at the Public Area Evaluate, “Witkacy ready quite a few research of shoppers and associates for his portrait portray firm, based within the mid-Twenties.” The medication induced “totally different approaches to color, method, and composition. The ensuing pictures are surreal — and infrequently horrific.” Typically the medication in query have been restricted to caffeine, a each day staple of artists in all places. He additionally made portraits whereas abstaining from different addictive substances like nicotine and alcohol.

At different occasions, Witkacy’s notes — written in a type of code — specified extra pronounced utilization. He made the portrait above, of Nina Starchurska, in 1929 whereas on “narcotics of a superior grade,” together with mescaline synthesized by Merck and “cocaine + caffeine + cocaine + caffeine + cocaine.” One other portrait of Starchurska (beneath) made in that very same 12 months concerned some heavy doses of peyote, amongst different issues.

Witkacy’s investigations have been literary as effectively, culminating in a 1932 e book of essays referred to as Narcotics: Nicotine, Alcohol, Cocaine, Peyote, Morphone, Ether + Appendices. The e book “owes a lot to the experimental works of different European psychonauts all through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” Invoking the decadent moralism of Thomas De Quincey and Baudelaire, and it anticipates the utopian, psychedelic prose of Aldous Huxley and Carlos Castaneda.

The place he would possibly fulminate, with satirical edge, in opposition to the usage of medication, Witkacy additionally joyously data their liberating results on his artistic consciousness. His chapter on peyote “most intently approximates the spirit” of his work, notes Bibiliokept in a evaluate of the lately republished quantity:

“Peyote” begins with Witkiewicz taking his first of seven (!) peyote doses at six within the night and culminating round eight the next morning with “Straggling visions of iridescent wires.” In increments of about quarter-hour, Witkiewicz notes every of his surreal visions. The wild hallucinations are rendered in equally surreal language: “Mundane disumbilicalment on a cone to the barking of flying canine dragons” right here, “The start of a diamond goldfinch” there. 

Elsewhere he writes of “elves on a seesaw (Comedic quantity)” and “a battle of centaurs changed into a battle between fantastical genitalia,” all of which lead him to conclude, “Goya should have recognized about peyote.”

Narcotics capabilities as a type of key to Witkacy’s pondering as he made the portraits; half drug diary, half inventive assertion of goal, it features a “Checklist of Symbols” to assist decode his shorthand. The artist dedicated suicide in 1939 when the Crimson Military invaded Poland. Had he lived to attach with the psychedelic revolution to come back, maybe he would have been the artist to make psychotropic drug use a good type of tremendous artwork. Then we would think about conversations in galleries going one thing like this: “Excuse me, was this artist on medication?” “Why sure, actually. She took massive doses of psylocybin when she made this. It’s proper right here in her manifesto…..”

See many extra Witkacy portraits by visiting Juliette Bretan’s publish at the Public Area Evaluate.

Associated Content material:

When Aldous Huxley, Dying of Most cancers, Left This World Tripping on LSD, Experiencing “the Most Serene, the Most Stunning Demise” (1963)

Artist Attracts 9 Portraits Whereas on LSD: Contained in the Fifties Experiments to Flip LSD right into a “Creativity Tablet”

R. Crumb Describes How He Dropped LSD within the 60s & Immediately Found His Creative Model

Take a Journey to the LSD Museum, the Largest Assortment of “Blotter Artwork” within the World

Josh Jones is a author and musician primarily based in Durham, NC. Observe him at @jdmagness