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THE ZAKOPANE STYLE OF STANISŁAW WITKIEWICZ - A FASCINATING ALBUM PUBLISHED IN POLISH AND ENGLISH
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This ground-breaking album, published by award-winning BOSZ publishing house, is written by the director of the Tatra Museum, Teresa Jabłońska, and designed by Leszek Szurkowski, with contemporary photographs by Piotr Droździk. It includes many historic photographs of the unique and influential wooden and masonry buildings conceived by the visionary Stanisław Witkiewicz in the Zakopane Style at the turn of the 19th century, as well as some very rarely seen early pictures of the Tatra mountains and the village of Zakopane (among others the first known photograph, dated 1860). This lavishly illustrated album is published in a combined Polish and English version.
Teresa Jabłońska writes about the album: The Zakopane Style developed as a unique phenomenon. In a remote village at the foot of the Tatra mountains at the end of the 19th century, a handful of the Polish intelligentsia, together with Tatra Highlanders from the Zakopane region, created a distinctive Polish national art-form. This book documents their achievement alongside that of Stanisław Witkiewicz, who dedicated a good part of his life and work to creating a Polish style. The result was the Zakopane Style, which embraced all elements of design. Although not much remains today of the legacy of Stanisław Witkiewicz and his circle of associates, its lasting importance and influence cannot be overestimated. What survives includes a few wooden villas - amongst them the most important is Koliba (1892-1894), which today houses The Museum of the Zakopane Style, and the house, Pod Jedlami (1896-1897), which features original furnishings from the late 1890s. Witkiewicz’s Zakopane Style also influenced church art and architecture – as illustrated by the altar and furnishings of The Chapel of Saint John the Baptist at the Church of the Holy Family in Zakopane and the Chapel of The Sacred Heart of Jesus at Jaszczurówka. Witkiewicz and his associates also left a lasting body of work in handicrafts, furniture, fabrics, ceramics, stained-glass, lacework, jewellery, metalwork and many household items with a distinctive and immediately recognisable style associated with Zakopane. This book explores the origins and the extraordinarily rich and varied results of the unique partnership of Witkiewicz and his Tatra Highlander associates in developing the Zakopane Style at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
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