In 1925, Polish writer, painter, photographer, philosopher, playwright, and novelist Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939) also known as Witkacy, parodically pronounced the death of art and opened a private portraiture firm, an artist's studio where patrons, qua customers, could purchase a portrait, but were subjected to a contract with a striking list of options and rules. The paintings, sketches, and pastels produced through this process range from the prettified portraits of Type A through the substance-enhanced Type C to the sober Type E, which the artist notates with pedantic precision in a pharmacological shorthand worthy of Mendeleev.
The firm served the basic pragmatic function of providing a steady income, an alternative to both art and craft. Portraiture thus became a site of cultural critique, forcing patrons to make a choice, casting themselves as consumers of a certain type. In the case of those who desired the novelty of a narcotics-fueled portrait...