Asymmetrical Lady

Who was Eugenia Wyszomirska-Kuźnicka (1903–1979), whom the artist called Hanka or Asymmetrical Lady?

Witkacy wrote to her on July 14, 1937: Lady, perhaps you would like to come to dinner to me tomorrow (Thursday) or on Friday, as I am burning with eagerness to draw your asymmetry and tell a few stories.

Eugenia Wyszomirska, a 30-year-old woman of original beauty, whose marriage was going through a crisis, found the proposal to come to Zakopane to pose for a well-known painter and a handsome man attractive.

The woman was endowed with a certain inner power and mystery.

Despite the fact that she hailed from an artisan and working-class family from the suburbs of Częstochowa, she mesmerised men, frequently even those from the higher levels of the social ladder. At the age of 19, she got married for the first time, to a jeweller and became a wealthy bourgeois woman.

Witkacy was attracted by her irregular facial features, and, above all, by her striking resemblance to his ex-fiancee, who had committed suicide in 1914.

That event continued to trouble the artist, as he felt complicit in the tragedy. Therefore, he transformed it into art, repeatedly returning to the traumatic incident.

Eugenia was asymmetrical because she had irregular facial features, but also because the artist perceived her a bit as the person she was and a bit as a memory – she was partly flesh, and partly an apparition. Fortunately, however, she had her own strong personality - admittedly not a sublime intellectual, but filled with the desire to live and have fun – a woman full of character.

Her spontaneous nature made her become a muse of one of the greatest Polish artists who continuously "craved the possibility of drawing her".

Initially, it was difficult for Wyszomirska to settle into the role of a muse of an eccentric artist 18 years her senior. She told her family that she was going to Zakopane to soothe her shattered nerves.

However, in the spa, the famous 'zakopianina' – a mixture of crystalline fresh air, mountainous spaces and the 'cream of the cream' of the society – had a dramatic impact on her.

The Asymmetrical Lady became ever more beautiful with every picture and Witkacy painted her many times as she became –as he would say– his natural drug. She existed in his life outside his will and as part of his personality.

Eugenia fell into the vortex of Zakopane 'demonism'. She lived in renowned guesthouses, with the famous Zofia Krzeptowska (nicknamed Kapucha). She wandered around the Tatra Mountains, she became friends with Waleria Głogowska, whose husband Józef Głogowski initiated her into photography, and she took part in high-profile social gatherings of the elite.

She believed in herself again and ended her unhappy marriage, leaving her husband and only son in Częstochowa. She fell in love and married Józef Stopka, a handsome mountain guide and rescuer in 1935.

Witkacy still asked her for posing for him, insatiably hungry for her face and… his own legend. In April 1935, he wrote: Could you please free yourself for 2 hours on Tuesday and come to me at 1/2 past eleven for an important conversation and 1, or possibly 2, drawings before an orgy.

Addressing her in a letter in May 1935 - written, incidentally, in Katowice, he used the title A Son Excellence La Dame Asymétrique…

In the 1930’s, Witkiewicz considered himself primarily a philosopher and gave this field primacy over the other ones, creating and developing an ontological system based on the idea of biological monadism. However, he always emphasised that neither philosophy nor any other science can unravel the Secret of Existence.

We must accept the fact of the existence of a matter which can sense and perceive itself, which is above all, materially and physically personal, as a fact absolutely primeval and still inexplicable – he wrote in the treaty Traktat o bycie samym w sobie i dla siebie. Implicitly, he suggested: where philosophy does not reach, where the language of science is insufficient, Art is necessary.

Witkacy only needed inspiration. Especially, he needed this woman to give him an extraordinary impulse to cross the borders of time, to return to the past.