Maria Lassnig is an austrian artists who was interested in the relations between the sexes, as her art repeatedly revealed.
Maria Lassnig born in Kappel am Krappfeld (Carithia, Austria) in 1919. She studied in the academy of Art of Vienna during the Second World War (1939-1945). Austria during that conflict didn’t exist like a country; it was an extension of Germany. Hitler annexed Austria because he was born there and he wanted that the people who spoke German lived in the same country.
Lassnig didn’t give a lot of information about their life during the conflict, but the first pictures were influenced by the restrictions and problems that the artist had at that time with her work. For example, it wasn’t possible for her to get information about expressionism or other movements. Her first paintings weren’t accepted because of the laws about art in the Nazism.
Maria Lassnig didn’t like to talk about herself because she said that “her painting explains her point of view”. But she said in an interview that she was that kind of child that loved drawing and spend time with a pen and a piece of paper because that made her keep calm.
One of her first paintings was Informal. In this first period of her work, she drew with watercolors and she was interested in nature and abstract expressionism. In this period of her life she was part of the group Hundsgruppe (Dog Pack), which worked with action painting and started to paint using the expressionism.
She lived in Vienna until 1952 when she travelled to Paris and became member of the Art-Club (an association of artist during the period 1946-1959). During that travel she met the surrealist Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret and became friends with the poet Paul Celen, who influenced a lot of her work.
In her painting around the 50’s – 60’s, she was influenced by the surrealism and cubism. She started to create self-portraits which didn’t have some part of their bodies, and she used colors not naturals. One of the portraits for example is Expressive Self- Portrait (1948, one of her first self-portraits) and Science Fiction (1963) this picture has no background, only strong colors and mechanic figures.
Another example is Breakfast With an Ear (1967), which is focused on the separation of the different parts of the body around a room. That picture is focused on modern housewives.
In 1968 she moved to New York City, because her paintings weren’t understood by society so she needed to find other ways for express herself. In that moment everything changed, both the themes of the painting and the way of drawing. She re-started. In New York she created large pictures using the technique of silkscreen and invented a new name for all her paintings: Body awareness. She never used the terms: Cubism, surrealism, expressionism for defining her work, because she always said that the words which finished it ism, weren’t for her paintings.
Körpergefühl (body sensation) and Körperbewusstsein (body awareness) were the names that she gave to all their paintings: self-portraits, body paintings and all the paintings with body sensitive. She put her body in the center of her work and tried to separate the sensation of the awareness. She was focused on the self-portraits and the controversy between the inside and the outside of her body.
Lassnig explained that, she tried not to think about her feelings and separate emotions from the body. Lassnig said : “It’s complicated. Because what you feel and the place you feel it constantly changes. I normally sketched an outline of the feeling, a contour. To draw a total abstraction of the feeling is almost impossible. I’ve started doing it again. I recently arrived at the contour again.”
In her paintings she never drew the feeling of body movement, for example falling down or crashing accidently with something because “the work deals with calm, static postures. That’s complicated enough. Anything else is too spectacular, too theatrical. And because I’m not theatrical myself, I know nothing about it. For me, the question of the most comfortable position was of primary importance. I stood in front of the canvas and asked myself the question: how am I standing? And then there was the hand I had to move to the canvas, with the brush. I had stretched-out feelings, or standing feelings. No moving feelings”
The Self-portrait Encased in Plastics (1972) was the first painting using the body and the human figures as the center of the drawing. At that moment all the figures were a self-portrait of herself, she wanted to show “her internal world”.
One of the characteristics of her paintings were that there was no background; she explained that the most important thing for defining an idea was the drawing itself. She thought that it was not necessary for anything else. For that reason, most of her paintings are only the pictures of the body sensation and she tried to express human feelings.
Peter Eleey said that Maria Lassing is “the perfect artist for the age of the selfie”, not only because she rejected the traditional self-portrait, also because she described herself in different positions and showed her real body without thinking of her age.
One common thing in her last drawings was that she tried to paint her feelings and only the emotions without the body. In most of her pictures the most important thing she presented was herself. She was both the model and the artist. For example in 2005 she painted one of her most famous pictures (You and me) which represented Maria Lassnig when she was 80 years old, naked, and pointing at the spectator with a gun.
There were no heads or arms or legs. Because she tried to paint only the parts of the body that she felt it at the moment that she was drawing. She describe that picture that: “ something happens; a story. Portraying one person is rarely enough to tell a story. But when there are two people in a picture, that is already a story. One cannot help attributing meaning to their relationship.”
Maria Lassnig wasn’t only made pictures.
But Maria Lassnig not only explores the world of the pictures. When she was living in New York (1980) she did a film course in the School visual Arts in NYC (SVA). Living in the United States she started making animated films because her paintings were not understood.
Baroque Statues (1970) Iris (1971) Chairs (1971) Selfportrait (1971), Shapes (1972) Couples (1972), Palmistry (1973) and Art Education (1976).
In all this films she represented the same themes that in her paintings: the difference between male and female, and her problems for being a woman and artists. In all the films she talked about the patriarchal system but with an ironic and fun way. For example, in Self-portrait, she spoke about herself, her dreams, her search for a male partner.
Indeed in Art education, she gave her interpretation about different artists, like Miquelangelo, Vermmer. As a form to criticism the art education and the relationship between a male artist and female model, she re-wrote an old poem:
“Oh Lady bright, can it be right?
Your window, open to the night?
Oh Lady dear, oh have no fear,
why and what are you dreaming here?
Strange is your pallor, strange your dress,
strange, you will be soon a mess,
and this in solemn silliness!”
https://www.flimmit.com/art-education/
In 1992 did one of the most important films: Kantate (The balland of Maria Lassnig)
This is a video of her life, started in the childhood until the age of 70, describing with humor and ironic all the episodes that she lived. She described this film like:
“The world and the people in their comic-tragic confusion, prejudices, and superstitions gave me plenty of material, to point my finger at. Imperfection and pain can be overcome with humor. To write articles, dialogues, and songs as a painter was a big adventure, but it also awakened my conscience and a feeling of responsibility, if not before the film then in any case afterwards.”
In 1980 she decided to return to Vienna because the Academy for Applied Arts offered a job as a teacher, was the first female professor teaching there. It was the first moment that the people started to know her work, for that reason she represented Austria in the Biennal de Venecia (1980).
Also she wrote a book called The Pen is the sister of The Brush, Diaries (1943-1997)
Recognition /Exposicions.
“After 70 years of painting, with many hardships and needs, after many successful exhibitions and tardy, must now receive this great prize, I can no longer be picked up in person.”
She sent this speech when in 2013 she received the Golden Lion in the Biennal of Vennezia, but she couldn’t go to the ceremony. She worked all her life in her project, she tried to express and communicate with the the world, but the recognition arrived late.
Lassnig achieved recognition from the 1940s around Europe and, later, the US but it was not until 2008, at the age of nearly 90, that she was given her first solo exhibition in Britain. Other exposition alone was in 2010, when she had 90 years old in Galerie im Lenbachhaous (Munich, Germany), in 2011 Friedrich Petzel Gallery (NYC) and in 2013 in Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2013).
The real recognitision arrived post-mortem, but during her life she won a few prizes: the Grand Austrian State Prize for the Visual Art (1988), the Oskar Kokoschka Prize (1998), the Rubens Prize city of Siegen (2002), Max Beckhamn Prize (2004) and Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (2005).
Why Maria Lassning?
We don’t have a lot of information about the personal life of Maria Lassnig because she repeated in various interviews, that she didn’t want to talk about herself because their paintings did it. She was an artist that was really worried to answer questions about her and the representation about women. She drew, wrote and made film on the subject was always herself and the representation about her body and her feelings.
One time I read that when you need to talk about an artist or paint, you need to feel something, you can hate it or love one piece, but not feel indifferent about it. And that happen to me when I saw Maria Lassnig. This woman spent 70 years off her live trying to show what she felt inside. She was still working when she have 90 years old. During her live a lot of people talk about her work was “degenerate”, but she never stop. She travelled, she worked hard and when someone talk about talent she answer: “Talent? I like to draw? “ And you, What do you like to do?
More information.
Images:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRjT2AdHVP
- http://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/19/maria-lassnig/images-clips/
Interviews:
- http://db-artmag.com/en/53/feature/real-bodys-interview-with-maria-lassnig/
- http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/inside_out/
- http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/maria-lassnig/
Others :
- http://www.petzel.com/artists/maria-lassnig/
- http://www.fundaciotapies.org/site/spip.php?article8251
- http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2014/05/08/actualidad/1399581236_921065.html.
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