Krytyka pretensjonalnego historyzmu w twórczości Witkacego i Gruszczyńskiego na przykładzie ul. Retoryka w Krakowie
Criticism of the pretentious Historicism in the works of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz and Włodzimierz Gruszczyński: The example of Retoryka Street in Krakow

Summary/Abstract: The paper discusses the fin de siècle architecture at Retoryka Street in Krakow and its reception by avant-garde artists of the next century. In the late 19th century, the textuality of Historicism was approved, but a generation later it was considered pretentious. One of the critics was Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, a writer and a painter. He was a member of the avant-garde group “The Formists” and he was in love with Jadwiga Unrug, who lived at the end of Retoryka Street. In his novel Insatiability (published 1930) he did not describe the architecture of these tenement houses, but their inhabitants dreaming „a Krakow dream of power”. The second artist was Włodzimierz Gruszczyński, who (in 1929) remodelled the richly decorated Egyptian House into simplified Art-Deco. The attitudes of Witkiewicz and Gruszczyński towards fin de siècle are negations: for Witkiewicz it applies to the „contents”, and for Gruszczyński – to the architectural shape

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