Motesiczky Unveiled: Who? Beckmann’s Star Student

Exactly what it is about German art that speaks to me I can not say. As you may recall, for example, I am a big fan of Max Beckmann.

So it was not surprising, I guess, that one artist I discovered last week, at the ADAA’s annual Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory, turned out to have been a student of Beckmann’s.

You may have already heard of Marie-Louise Motesiczky, but in case not, I’m calling her to your attention. According to Galerie St. Etienne, in 1927 Beckmann told her, “Paula Modersohn-Becker was the best woman painter in Germany, and you have every chance of succeeding her.”

Of course, I wish he had not used the qualifier “woman,” but it was a different time. Fact is, the public doesn’t know much about either artist.

Galerie St. Etienne held an exhibition of Motesiczky’s paintings last fall, but it ended on Dec. 30, and I never saw it. A few of her works were at the Art Show, though. Here I’m sharing Self-Portrait in Black, 1959, a mix of oil, charcoal and pastel on canvas.

Jane Kallir, co-director of GSE, told me that there is a move afoot to organize a museum show for Motesiczky.

Meantime, you may want to go to GSE’s website, and click on Exhibtions — Past, to learn more about her backstory, which is full of the glitz and the intrigue that was part of Jewish life in the Austro-Hungarian empire and its aftermath. It’s a fascinating tale that can not be summed up here, really. But it involves connections to many renowned personalities, her escape from the Nazis, and her artistic development. Here’s one bit about her art:

Very few of the painters who dominated the art scene in prewar Austria and Germany survived, artistically, the upheaval of the Nazi period. Whether they went into actual or “inner” exile, the work they produced in the second part of the twentieth century seldom met the standards of what they had created earlier. Motesiczky is the great exception to this pattern: a painter who actually discovered her artistic identity in exile.

In England, Beckmann’s influence gradually dissipated, and the solid, sculptural masses seen in Motesiczky’s prior paintings were replaced by more translucent, lambent veils of color. Just as this increased transparency allows one to see down through the structural layers below a painting’s surface, it allows more access to the interior life of the subject. With characteristic humility, Motesiczky once said that her intention was to depict women’s everyday existence: “women at the hairdresser’s, girls sitting in the windows of dry-cleaning shops doing the invisible mending and gradually getting old, dying women, bathing women, laughing women, sad women.” In fact, what she achieved was a comprehensive meditation on life and loss, death and transcendence, seen through the eyes of a woman.

Maybe that’s why we don’t know of her. She was also, apparently, known for depicting women in old age. Not a favorite subject.

As a rich woman, Motesiczky did not sell her art, and much of it is in a London-based trust. It shouldn’t be hard to organize an exhibition. I hope some museums step up.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of The Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, London, and Galerie St. Etienne, New York