Marie-Louise Von Motesiczky
Encyclopedia
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
n painter
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
.
Life and work
She was born in ViennaVienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
in 1906 to an aristocratic
Aristocracy (class)
The aristocracy are people considered to be in the highest social class in a society which has or once had a political system of Aristocracy. Aristocrats possess hereditary titles granted by a monarch, which once granted them feudal or legal privileges, or deriving, as in Ancient Greece and India,...
family. Her father Edmund von Motesiczky was a talented cellist and keen huntsman. Her mother Henriette von Lieben, came from one of the most wealthy and cultured families in the Habsburg Empire. They had donated many of the art-works in the Kunsthistorisches Museum
Kunsthistorisches Museum
The Kunsthistorisches Museum is an art museum in Vienna, Austria. Housed in its festive palatial building on Ringstraße, it is crowned with an octagonal dome...
, and, in their palatial salon opposite the opera, Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Hugo Laurenz August Hofmann von Hofmannsthal ; , was an Austrian novelist, librettist, poet, dramatist, narrator, and essayist.-Early life:...
had read his first poems. Their own art-collection at the family's country estate in Hinterbruhl
Hinterbrühl
Hinterbrühl is a town in the district of Mödling in the Austrian state of Lower Austria. It is home to the Seegrotte, a system of caves including Europe's largest underground lake. During World War II, a satellite camp of Mauthausen concentration camp was opened inside the caverns, producing parts...
was formidable. After leaving school aged only 13, Marie attended art schools in various locations around Europe including Vienna, Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
(at the Montparnasse Painting Academy) and Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
. In 1928, Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann
Max Beckmann was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement...
invited her to join his masterclass at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, where she honed her craft and the two became life-long friends. Motesiczky spent the next 10 years developing her craft but, as her family included Jewish descent, she had to flee the Nazi annexation
Anschluss
The Anschluss , also known as the ', was the occupation and annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in 1938....
of Vienna in 1938.
Motesiczky, accompanied by her mother Henriette, fled to London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
via Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
where she joined the Artists' International Association and contributed to some of their exhibitions; her first solo exhibition followed in London in 1944. Her brother, who stayed behind, was killed by the Nazis for opposing the regime. During this period she also became romantically involved with the writer Elias Canetti
Elias Canetti
Elias Canetti was a Bulgarian-born modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer. He wrote in German and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power".-Life:...
, who was to remain a close companion and friend for many years to come.
Following the end of the war, Motesiczky exhibited her paintings in many European institutions and she continued to work from her house in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, where she lived only with her mother and a single maid. She had grown to love London. Her mother became the subject of many of her paintings after 1960, with Motesiczky chronicling her encroaching frailty in paintings such as The Old Song and From Night into Day. Motesiczky also painted many figurative ‘fantasy paintings’, dream-like paintings which blurred fantasy and reality but which alluded to her own experience and were loaded with personal symbolism.
Motesiczky's major breakthrough in the UK occurred in 1985, with a major retrospective at the Goethe Institute in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, which generated much acclaim and saw her reputation as a major Austrian artist cemented. However, on the subject of exhibiting, as The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
wrote, "Motesiczky never needed to sell her paintings, indeed she preferred to keep them around her. An aristocratic disdain for the marketplace meant that, while she half welcomed exhibitions, they remained uncomfortable experiences." Apart from several works in well-known public collections, including the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery (London), the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Österreichische Galerie im Belvedere and numerous private collections, she kept the main body of her work in her own house. She died in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
in 1996.
Of her life in art, she once remarked “If you could only paint a single good picture in your lifetime, your life would be worthwhile.”