Maria Lassnig - Ways of Being Albertina Vienna
The trend continues. If you are asking which trend, you must have missed my post on Kiki Smith - where I mentioned how the art world currently experiences an abundance of exhibitions on women artists.
I only had limited time in Vienna on my recent visit, therefore I had to chose carefully which exhibitions to see. After Kiki Smith I had time for one more show. So I decided to go back to my Austrian roots and visited "Maria Lassnig. Ways of Being". Lassnig is one of the few female Austrian artists who made it on the international art scene. She would have been 100 years old this month had she not died in 2014 after a successful career that spanned seven decades. The Albertina Museum marked the occasion of the centenary of her birth with a major retrospective of her work.
Walking through the exhibition, taking in her abstract beginnings, then seeing her work's development up until her idiosyncratic nude self portraits as an old woman, made me realise what a special and unique person she must have been. Her work, like Kiki Smith's, tells the story of her life; yet Lassnig had a different way of communicating what she was about.
Her life was not an easy one. She was born in the Austrian South in 1919 and after initially training as a teacher, she soon realised that teaching was not her calling. In 1941 she travelled the 300 km to Vienna on her bike, to start studying at the Academy of Fine Arts. This was the time of the Nazi regime in Austria, so her rejection of the academic realism favoured by the regime, as well as her inclination to produce what was considered 'degenerate art', did not go down well with her tutors.
Once she left the academy she looked for inspiration in Austrian painters of the past, such as Schiele and Kokoschka. Their influences left their mark on Lassnig's work, especially noticeable in her figuration and coloration.
The abstract figures in her early paintings already convey a solidity to the viewer; her brush strokes are bold and strong, placed with certainty.This continues in later figuration and her subjects always have a strong presence on the canvas. She also displays confidence in the choice of colours. In her compositions she favours complimentary colours, has a penchant for green backgrounds, and does not shy away from moving into the realm of unnatural neon shades or the pastel tones that can be traced back to Austrian Baroque. Interestingly, she assigned colours to emotions, a nose would have to be a 'smell colour', a forehead had to be painted in a 'thought colour'. She had a colour for love and hate, for pain, for depression and loneliness.
Her colour palette defines her recognisable style. Nevertheless her style is impossible to be categorised as it touches on too many "-isms" (as she called it). Her stylistic journey traces her actual movements: from Vienna to Paris, the US, Berlin and then back to Vienna. Despite, or possibly because of, all these influences Lassnig managed to establish her own style.
A style I want to call 'Lassnig-expressionism' and which she herself called "body-awareness-painting". She would create an image that could represent whatever she was feeling at that moment - but leaving it within the confines of her body. Her assistant, Hans Werner Poschauko, described the process as follows: Lassnig would listen inside her body and establish where it hurts. Then she would transfer that feeling onto the canvas quickly, finishing the painting within a couple of hours as - she insisted - the feeling would not stay the same for long. That is why her paintings often show only fragmented bodies - those were the parts she was aware of during the time she was wielding her paint brush.
She maintained that painting should be 'organic, personal and first-hand'. Her work is all of that. Using herself as the model she managed to externalise and express her inner feelings, showing the world her emotions, her thoughts and her self image. She was not one to gloss over physical shortcomings, her self portraits are brutally honest to the point of even shocking to the audience. Especially in her last works, for example 'You or Me', she depicts herself as an old woman with sagging breasts and facial features marked by a long life.
Lassnig was often called a feminist painter but she refuted that label. Yet, she often touched on feminist issues with paintings like her 'Kitchen War' series in the 1970s when she took up the issue of women's relationships with domesticity. Or with the piece titled 'Woman Laocoön'- which can be considered as a commentary on the fact that women have practically been written out of art history. There is also 'Woman Power' (painted towards the end of her stay in America which she saw as the "country of strong women") and 'Atlas' where she portrays herself as carrying the weight of the world.
The latter two aren't exactly images that mirror her outlook on life. People who have met her describe her as humorous and witty but shy, almost actively avoiding the limelight by always reacting with reluctance when asked to agree to an exhibition of her work. But also likeable and forever young, and definitely eccentric - in appearance and demeanour. Apparently she was wearing sneakers at all times (which she had initially brought with her from America); long before women were wearing them in Austria for anything except sports activities. She was also an astute business woman once she had gained recognition for her work. Her assistant tells the story of her putting on a show of the destitute artist in old clothes when a collector came to visit her studio to buy some of her works.
Recognition, and with it the ability to make a living from art, came very late in life. She was 60 when she got a professorship at the Academy in Vienna, which was groundbreaking at that time. She was the first woman painting professor in the German-speaking world. She achieved fame as a painter even later than that. In 2008, when she was almost 90, the Serpentine Gallery in London put on a big exhibition of her work and one British art critic called her "the discovery of the century". In 2013, one year before her death, she was awarded the Golden Lion lifetime achievement award at the Biennale in Venice.
Lassnig once said, when approached about a retrospective of her work: "A retrospective is for old or dead artists. I am a contemporary artist. I want to show my new work and nothing old." In fact, her work continued to evolve until the end of her career. New ideas were constantly emerging and repetitiveness was totally absent in her work.
What Lassnig said about herself is also true about her work: "I was never young, and now I'm not old". As a person and an artist she just was. 'Ways of Being' beautifully documents the facets of her oeuvre that will stay contemporary for many years to come.
If you would like to read more stories about Lassnig, told by people who knew her, click here.
Her paintings are amazing so I urge you to click through the gallery and take the time to look at the details. Or better still - go and see the exhibition in Vienna, it is on at the Albertina in Vienna
till December 1st, 2019.