newnotes

Hampstead Authors' Society No. 30 Issue 5. August 2001

It might be quite appropriate to call the artist Marie-Louise von Motesiczky a 'well-kept secret'. Only a relatively small circle of people know the paintings of Motesiczky. An even smaller circle are aware of her connection with figures like Elias Canetti and Iris Murdoch.

The substantial body of works Motesiczky left at her death in 1996 includes striking portraits of both. Especially Elias Canetti, who entertained a friendship with Motesiczky that lasted for more than fifty years, was a favourite if not an easy - and often evasive - subject-matter for the artist.

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky was not a prominent figure in the British art scene. Although the few solo exhibitions in England were extremely well received by the press and substantially enlarged the number of admirers of her work in this country, it is fair to say that Motesiczky achieved the status of a widely accepted artist only in her native Austria. Her relative obscurity in this country can be attributed to several factors. The émigré status left her without the established network of professional support. Her style of painting, a kind of Expressionism that was founded on her training with Max Beckmann, met with lack of interest. Furthermore, Motesiczky did not actively push her work into the public sphere and was rather content with focusing on creating new art works.

Her awareness and ambivalent evaluation of this fundamentally lonely situation that, however, might bear unique artistic possibilities is expressed in the following quotation: "In painting there was no confrontation. Isolation is a word. It sounds sad, but can also be something very beautiful. If isolation was good or bad, one can only know much later."

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky was born in Vienna in 1906. Having left school at the age of thirteen, she continued her education privately, visiting art schools in Vienna, The Hague, Frankfurt and Paris before being accepted in Max Beckmann's master class at the Städelschule in Frankfurt in 1926/27. Beckmann, whom she had already met as a teenager, was to have a shaping influence on her art and also became a lifelong friend.

During the following decade Motesiczky quietly practised her art in Vienna. When, in 1938, Hitler marched into Austria, Motesiczky, together with her mother, immediately left for Holland. Their flight would take them to England the following year where they settled in Amersham. After the war Motesiczky moved to London and eventually purchased a house in Hampstead where she lived for the last thirty years of her life, and continued to work steadily on her painting.

Like Motesiczky and her mother, another pair of refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe sought shelter in Amersham in the early 1940s: Elias Canetti and his wife Veza. Motesiczky and Canetti soon became close. Their long-lasting and intellectually extremely stimulating friendship survived the death of Veza and Canetti's subsequent founding of a family with his second wife Hera. However, it was extremely painful for Motesiczky to come to terms with the fact that her hopes of marrying Canetti eventually had to be buried.

Motesiczky met Canetti as a relatively young and unknown writer - he had just published his first novel Die Blendung a few years earlier - and was to support him throughout his career emotionally and practically as well as - occasionally - financially. Canetti would frequently work in Motesiczky's house and in this way became intimately familiar with her paintings on a day-to-day basis. Both were very appreciative of each other's work, and Canetti often favoured Motesiczky's latest paintings with effusive praise. Motesiczky showed her appreciation of Canetti's writings by including a copy of one of his books in the still-life Orchid of 1958. The spine of the book is labelled "Pio", Motesiczky's nickname for Canetti.

Ten years earlier, in In the Garden, Canetti had been included in a domestic scene showing Motesiczky and her aunt Ilse, engaged in rather imaginary gardening. As the German title Familienbild (family portrait) implies, Canetti was by then seen as part of the Motesiczky family. Yet, his frowning looks, detached stance, and slightly disapproving attitude suggest that he did not feel comfortable being thus appropriated.

The painting Self-portrait with Canetti of the mid 1960s further comments on the strained relationship between the "Dichter" and the painter. Having completed her work, her brushes washed and neatly arranged like arrows for use in the anticipated struggle, Motesiczky depicted herself patiently waiting for Canetti to finish his newspaper. He, however, is thoroughly engrossed in his reading and does not notice his expectant companion. The rift between the two characters and the seemingly palpable awkward atmosphere is exemplified by the two almost separate parts of the canvas.

It was Elias Canetti who introduced Iris Murdoch to the painter in the 1950s. Iris Murdoch's appreciation of and interest in Motesiczky's paintings spanned several decades and reached a climax in 1963. On the occasion of leaving St. Anne's College, Oxford, in order to devote her time fully to her novels, Murdoch commissioned Motesiczky to do a portrait of her. By that time, having just published her sixth novel, Murdoch had become a well-known and established figure on the British literary scene.

She chose Motesiczky as an artist she personally admired and thought undervalued in this country. With this commission she hoped to help increase Motesiczky's reputation and make her more familiar to a wider audience: "I admire her work very much and think she is not well enough known in England." A postcard from 1985 still expresses Murdoch's curiosity about new paintings by Motesiczky with the concise wish: "Would like to see you and pictures!" While certain personal traits of Canetti appear in several characters of Murdoch's novels, a painting by Motesiczky, together with a de Kooning and a Kokoschka, captures the essence of the remodelled interior of a formerly musty and old-fashioned house in the novel The Book and the Brotherhood from 1987: "The drawing room… was now painted a glowing aquamarine adorned with a huge scarlet abstract by de Kooning over the fireplace and two colourful conversation pieces by Kokoschka and Motesiczky."

In her portraits of Canetti and Murdoch, just like in so many of her other works, Motesiczky succeeds in standing back and disassociating herself from her subject-matter - her friends - while at the same time, with immense integrity and courage, managing to relate to them sympathetically. As an intensive observer of her surroundings, Motesiczky creates portraits that are extremely honest - and sometimes seemingly crude - depictions of her sitters. They nevertheless seem to capture the sitter's true identity and the situation they find themselves in.

Ines Schlenker was born in Germany. Having done an M.BA. in Tübingen, she came to London in 1992 to study art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She specialized in German art of the twentieth century, focusing on Expressionism, 'degenerate' art, National Socialist Art, art looted during the Third Reich and exile art.

While doing her Ph.D, she worked at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, was involved in the exhibition Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators, 1930-1945 at the Hayward Gallery in 1995, and in the preparation of the acclaimed Dictionary of Women Artists (1997). Since 1998 she has been a researcher for the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, working on a catalogue raisonné of the paintings. She has lectured and published on various aspects of twentieth century German art and is currently preparing her Ph.D. for publication.