Relentless against yourself
She always delivers herself. She paints the way she is perceiving herself: bent or distorted, as an animal or as an oversized eye. With stilts instead of feet or with a saucepan on the head. As a triple ego to be in "3 ways", once without arms, once with a pig's head, once in a thinker pose. Body awareness calls Maria Lassnig her work, and it is rarely flattering, what can be seen on it. Often she is naked, or meets us - as in the picture "you or me" - with all the unprotected old age, the breasts flabby, the belly wrinkled. At the same time she holds two pistols in her hands. One aims at her counterpart, the other at her head. The self-portrait tells of an old dilemma: Art is the weapon to be hit with, but you also risk your own life.
"3 ways to be", 2004 oil on canvas, 126 x 205 cm
The work of Maria Lassnig, born in 1919, has a big theme: femininity. There is the strong woman who trudges like Godzilla through a city, the skyscrapers just reach her waist. Or the woman who sleeps with the tiger, and you do not know who is defeating whom. Or the two figures on a "double self-portrait", one bears Maria Lassnig's features, the other is a green lump that looks like the female genitals. Lassnig also painted himself as a liver or as a dumpling, many of her paintings have a profound sense of humor, or rather: shame. The artist Maria Lassnig is Austrian.
She grew up in simple conditions in Carinthia. Her mother did not want the illegitimate child at first, Maria was with her grandmother who worked in the field, often she got sick. Art became the world in which she could escape, even as a child she had "scribbled and scratched", says Maria Lassnig. She speaks with a soft Austrian accent, her sentences often end with the typical Carinthian word "gell".
Cold light green, bright yellow - for Maria Lassnig quite typical colors
She first trained as a primary school teacher, one day she then cycled to Vienna and applied at the Vienna Academy of the Arts. In 1941 she was accepted, after two years she had to leave the academy again, because one found her handling of colors "degenerate". The pastel, sometimes slightly poisonous-looking colors would later become her trademark, the cold lime green, the bright yellow, the red she took when she painted her body and felt "burning the skin".
After the war Maria Lassnig traveled a lot, she went to Paris, in 1968 to New York, later she lived for a while in Berlin. America has inspired her the most, she says. The culture of positive thinking came just right there. Her mother, to whom she later had a close relationship, had died a few years earlier, "I was very depressed." The sale of the inherited house enabled her to move to New York. It distracted her, she walked through the streets, "there was a photo shop on every corner, I immediately bought three cameras". In one class she learned how to make cartoons and produced her first own films. Nevertheless, she remained loyal to painting, even in times when painting was once again declared dead.
Maria Lassnig in her studio
Photos of the 30-year-old Maria Lassnig show a woman with dark curls, a girlish appearance, but also has something purposeful. It was simply not done to her, in male-dominated art, she was the only woman on the floor for decades. Did she feel like a pioneer? "You know it yourself, but nobody discovered me," says Maria Lassnig.
Men who were younger than her moved past her, Arnulf Rainer, for example, with whom she had been living for a while and with whom she founded informal painting in Austria. With his overpainting of pictures and photos he became internationally famous. On the other hand, her life is often "hung on the line", says Maria Lassnig. "Windily soft, like jam, bloody marmalade, I'm beaten, as prevented, excluded from painting," she wrote in 1993 in her diary. At the age of 61, she became a professor at the Vienna University of Applied Arts, becoming the first woman in the German-speaking world. Her students were initially ridiculed, says one, who was then in Lassnigs class, the Austrian painter Ursula Hübner.
Your pictures achieve top prices in the international market
Maria Lassnig's great breakthrough came much later, in 1997, when her drawings were a highlight of Documenta X in Kassel. And this year there was a big exhibition in London.Maria Lassnig works as much as ever. The oldest picture from the London exhibition is just four years old, and one does not get the impression of any of the pictures that it would repeat anything of the past, as is often the case in artists' late work.
And the aging? Actually, she would always find clever and beautiful, the older she gets, says Maria Lassnig. Therefore, death is also "such a cruel, unjust conclusion," she notes once in her diary. Because he "unnecessarily destroys a laboriously constructed building glittering on the top".
Maria Lassnig starts to paint early in the morning because she is "parterre" in the evening. She detests artificial light. And even after so many years, she is still sometimes afraid of the empty screen. Even privately Maria Lassnig remained a loner. She has never married or been dependent on a man, she finally settled in Vienna. The fate of so many misjudged artists is spared Maria Lassnig. She can savor her success. Their pictures are now also achieving top prices on the international market. After the celebrated exhibition in London, Maria Lassnig's paintings are now shown in America.
