Marie-Louise von Motesiczky

 

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Self-Portrait with Red Hat, 1920s

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (1906-1996) was born in Vienna. Her father Edmund Motesiczky von Kesseleökeö was of ancient Hungarian nobility. A talented amateur cellist and devoted huntsman, he died when Marie-Louise was only three years old. Her mother Henriette came from an extremely wealthy and cultured family of Jewish bankers whose relations included many distinguished names from the social and intellectual life of Vienna (among them Richard Strauss, Anton Rubinstein, and Henrik Ibsen). 

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, View from the Window, Vienna, 1925

The family had donated many art works to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and, in their palatial salon opposite the opera, Hugo von Hofmannsthal had read his first poems. Their own art collection at the family's country estate in Hinterbrühl was formidable.The family also made an impact on the origin of psychoanalysis, Motesiczky’s grandmother Anna von Lieben being one of Sigmund Freud’s early patients. Her case is recorded as Frau Cäcilie M. in the annals of Psychoanalysis.

 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Psychoanalyst, n.d.

Aged 13, Motesiczky left school – a mistake, as she later admitted. She subsequently attended art classes in Vienna, The Hague, Frankfurt and Berlin. In 1926 she visited Paris where she rented a studio, and saw Max Beckmann from time to time. There she painted a first masterpiece (Paris Workman, below) and shortly afterwards a remarkable statuesque Self-portrait with Comb, now in the Belvedere, Vienna. A year later she was invited by Max Beckmann to join his master class at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Beckmann had been introduced to the Motesiczky family in 1920. He left a strong and lasting impression on Motesiczky both as a person and an artist and was to become a life-long friend. 

 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Paris Workman, 1926

Motesiczky spent a decade quietly developing her artistic skills, exhibiting only once, in 1933, with the Hagenbund. In the wake of Nazi Germany's invasion of Austria in 1938, she had to  leave her native country, as her family included Jewish descent. Motesiczky’s older brother Karl, a Marxist, was a friend of Heimito von Doderer and a close collaborator of Wilhelm Reich. Karl refused to leave Austria and used the family house near Vienna to shelter Jewish friends. In 1943 Karl was denounced and sent to Auschwitz where he died shortly afterwards. 

 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Portrait of Karl von Motesiczky, n.d.

With her mother Motesiczky went to Holland where she had her first solo exhibition in 1939. Shortly afterwards they left for England and, after a brief stay in London, settled in Amersham. It was here that Motesiczky met the writer Elias Canetti (the 1981 Nobel Prize winner in literature), with whom she became romantically involved. Canetti was a close friend and companion for the next three decades, and she painted him several times. Canetti wrote large parts of his famous Crowds and Power in  Motesiczky's London home. His was the last major portrait she painted in 1993, not long before he died, now in the National Portrait Gallery.

 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Elias Canetti, 1930s

Motesiczky was one of a menage à quatre, which Canetti himself characterized this way: "One complains, the other staggers, and the third breathes through gills. The proud owner of three very different women." The plaintiff was his wife Veza Canetti, his lurching lover the poet Friedl Benedikt, and Marie-Louise was the wife with the gills: Motesiczky often dreamed of fishes (they often appear in her paintings too). In 1942, Canetti dedicated a collection of aphorisms to Motesiczky, Aufzeichnungen für Marie-Louise, which was only published in 2005. These are records from the time of the Blitzkrieg, in which we already find Canetti's major themes: language, death, time, and utopia.

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky,The Travellers, 1940

In 1943, Motesiczky joined the Artists’ International Association and took part in several of their exhibitions. The following year, Motesiczky’s first solo exhibition in London took place at the Czechoslovak Institute. She also renewed her acquaintance with Oskar Kokoschka who had been a friend of the family in Vienna. After the war Motesiczky moved to London. Two solo exhibitions in The Hague and Amsterdam in 1952 were followed two years later by one at the Städtische Galerie in Munich and one at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London in 1960. The first success in Austria came in 1966 when the Wiener Secession staged a large solo exhibition which subsequently travelled to Linz, Bremen and Munich. In the early 1960s, she bought the house at 6 Chesterford Gardens where her mother soon joined her. By the time Henriette died in 1978, aged 96, Motesiczky had produced a series of beautiful and moving images of her. 

 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, The Magic Fish, n.d.

The artistic breakthrough in the United Kingdom came with the major solo exhibition at the Goethe-Institut in London in 1985 which achieved enormous critical acclaim. By the time the Österreichische Galerie im Belvedere in Vienna held a retrospective exhibition of Motesiczky’s work in 1994, she had already established her reputation as an important Austrian painter of the twentieth century. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky died in London on 10 June 1996.

The Sucker

Apollinaire - Le bestiaire ou Cortège d'Orphée (1911)

Le Poulpe 

Jetant son encre vers les cieux,
Suçant le sang de ce qu’il aime
Et le trouvant délicieux,
Ce monstre inhumain, c’est moi-même. 

Alfred Kubin, Der Sauger (The Sucker), c. 1900

The Octopus
Hurling his ink at skies above,
Sucking the blood of what he loves
And finding it delicious,
Is myself the monster, vicious.

Victor Brauner

  Victor Brauner, The Surrealist, 1947

Victor Brauner (1903-1966) was born in Piatra Neamt in the historical region of Moldavia, eastern Romania. He was the son of a Romanian-jewish timber manufacturer who settled in Vienna with his family for a few years. It was there that Victor attended the elementary school. When his family returned to Romania in 1914, he continued his studies at the evangelical school in Braila. Brauner attended the Art School in Bucharest (1919-1921), and started painting landscapes à la Cézanne. Then, as he testified himself, he went through all the stages: "Dadaist, Abstractionist, Expressionist". 

 Victor Brauner, Poet in Exile, 1930s

In 1924, the Mozart Galleries in Bucharest hosted Brauner's first personal exhibition. In that period he met the poet Ilarie Voronca, with whom he founded the 15HP avantgarde magazine. In this magazine Brauner published the articles The pictopoetry and The surrationalism. In 1925, he undertook his first journey to Paris, from where he returned to Romania in 1927. In the period 1928-1931 he was a contributor of Unu magazine (an avant-garde periodical of Dadaist and Surrealist conceptions), which published reproductions of most of his paintings and graphic works.

 Victor Brauner, Self-Portrait with a Plucked Eye, 1931

In 1930, Brauner settled permanently in Paris, where he became a friend of the Romanian poet Benjamin Fondane and met Yves Tanguy, who would later introduce him to the circle of the Surrealists. He lived on Rue Moulin Vert, in the same building as Giacometti and Tanguy. There he painted his famous Self-Portrait with a Plucked Eye (above) - a premonitory theme, since seven years later Brauner lost his left eye in a violent argument between the Spanish surrealist painters Oscar Dominguez and Esteban Francés (Brauner attempted to protect Francés and was hit by a glass thrown by Dominguez).

 Victor Brauner, Mr. K's Power of Concentration (part of left side of diptych), 1934

In 1933, André Breton opened Brauner’s first personal exhibition in Paris, at the Pierre Gallery. Mr. K’s power of concentration (above) and The strange case of Mr. K (below) were paintings that André Breton compared with Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi, "a huge, caricature-like satire of the bourgeoisie". The strange case of Mr. K can also be interpreted as a brilliant visualization of  Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis. Structured as a diptych, Mr. K’s power of concentration combines oil painting with a collage of heterogeneous objects. With this anonymous character, elephantine in figure and idiotic in look, Brauner evokes a ridiculous dictator, a kind of Ubu, with celluloid dolls clustered on his face and body. As André Breton remarked, however, given the history of the 20th century, "this image stopped making us laugh a long time ago."

 Victor Brauner, The strange case of Mr. K, 1933

In 1935, Brauner returned to Bucharest. He joined the ranks of the Communist Party for a short while, without a very firm conviction. In 1938, he returned to France. The same year, he met Jaqueline Abraham, who was to become his wife. At the time, he created a series of paintings called lycanthropic or chimeras. After Nazi Germany's invasion of France in 1940, Brauner had to leave Paris. He lived for a while in Perpignan  and Saint Feliu d’Amont. However, he kept in touch with the Surrealists that had taken refuge in Marseille, and, in 1941, he was granted the permission to move there too. 

 Victor Brauner, Prelude to a Civilization, 1954

After the war, Brauner settled in Paris again. In 1954, he produced Prelude to a civilization (above), one of his best known paintings. Brauner executed this work in encaustic, a technique in which paint is mixed with molten wax. Into the resulting hardened surface, he incised the figures with pen and ink. He had first employed this medium after he was forced to take refuge in Southern France and was unable to obtain his usual working materials. 

 Victor Brauner, La fiancée de la nuit, 1937

Around 1960, Brauner settled in Varengeville (Noremandie), where he spent most of his time working. In 1965, he created an ensemble of object-paintings full of vivacity, grouped under the titles Mythologie and Fêtes des mères. In 1966 he was chosen to represent France at the biannual exhibition in Venice, where an entire hall was dedicated to him. Brauner died in Paris, on March 12, 1966, as a result of a prolonged illness. The epitaph on his tomb at Montmartre cemetery is a phrase from one of his notebooks: "Peindre, c'est la vie, la vraie vie, ma vie". You can see more works by Victor Brauner in my Flickr set.

The Flea

Apollinaire - Le bestiaire ou Cortège d'Orphée (1911)

La Puce 

Puces, amis, amantes même,
Qu’ils sont cruels ceux qui nous aiment !
Tout notre sang coule pour eux.
Les bien-aimés sont malheureux. 

Conrad Felixmüller, The Flea, 1928

The Flea

Fleas, friends, lovers too,
How cruel are those who love us!
All our blood pours out for them.
The well-beloved are wretched then.

Arthur Kaufmann

 Arthur Kaufmann, Self-Portrait, 1931

Arthur Kaufmann (1888-1971) was born in Mühlheim, an industrial town in the Ruhr Valley. From 1904 to 1906 he studied at the Düsseldorf School of Applied Arts. During the next years, he visited Italy England and France where he continued his studies with  Le Fauconnier in Paris at the prestigious Académie Julian.

Arthur Kaufmann, Lady in Black Coat, 1926

He was a founding member of Das Junge Rheinland (Young Rhineland), a stylistically diverse group co-led by Herbert Eulenberg, Gerd Wollheim, and Adolf Uzarski, which was united by a rejection of academic art. Other members included Otto Dix and Jankel Adler. During this era, he created such masterpieces as The Contemporaries (below) and a portrait of Jankel Adler (1927).

Arthur Kaufmann, The Contemporaries, 1925. The Painting shows members of the artist's association "Das Junge Rheinland" (The Young Rhineland). Lower row left to right: Gert Wollheim, Johanna Ey, Karl Schwesig, Adalbert Trillhaase. Upper Row left to right:Herbert Eulenberg, Theo Champion, Jankel Adler, Hilde Schewior, Ernst te Peerdt, Arthur Kaufmann, Walter Ophey, Otto Dix, Lisbeth Kaufmann, Hans Heinrich Nicolini.

Jewish in origin, Kaufmann was labeled "degenerate" by the Nazis in 1933 and discharged - along with Paul Klee (Klee's self-portrait Struck from the List (1933) commemorates the sad occasion), as well as many more of his colleagues - from his post at the Düsseldorf School of Applied Arts. Kaufmann relocated to the Netherlands, and then to the United States, where he embarked upon a career as a celebrated portrait painter. 

 Arthur Kaufmann, Untitled, c. 1930

In the United States, Kaufmann specialized in depictions of well-known men, including Edward G. Robinson, Albert Einstein, and George Gershwin (whose affidavit was responsible for Kaufmann's safe departure from Germany). His portrait of Gershwin is now held by the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution. Kaufmann died in 1971 in Novo Friburgo, Brazil, during a stay with his daughter.

Arthur Kaufmann, The Intellectual Emigration, 1938-1965

Kaufmann's best known work today is the above tryptich Die Geistige Emigration (The Intellectual Emigration) which he started painting in 1938 and only completed in 1965. It depicts 38 German and Austrian celebrities (including Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Ernst Bloch and George Grosz) who emigrated to the United States after 1933. You can see Arthur Kaufmann next to his wife far right in the middle row.

Painters of the Holocaust - Bergen-Belsen

I recently wrote about Czech painter Josef Čapek who died in 1945 - only a few days before the prisoners of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp were freed by the Allied Armies. The Imperial War Museum holds an important collection of works by British artists who were witnesses of the liberation. They all responded to the overwhelmingly distressing scenes there with images that sought to convey detail and narrative.

"The Camp is large 12 sq miles and divided into compounds like chicken runs with huts bare of any furniture or conveniences. The huts normally accommodate 50 but as many as 400 were put in." (Leslie Cole)

 Leslie Cole, The Compound for Women, 1945

Leslie Cole (1910-1977) was born in Swindon. He trained as an artist at the Royal College of Art in London and became a teacher at Hull College of Art in 1937. Cole wrote to the War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC) in 1940 asking for work as a war artist, but he was turned down. At this time, Cole also joined the RAF only to be discharged on health grounds soon after. Determined to be a witness to the unfolding events, he approached the WAAC again, sending pieces of completed work reflecting the war situation in Hull and his home town of Swindon. Eventually, Cole became a salaried war artist with an honorary commission as a captain in the Royal Marines.

 Leslie Cole, Sick Woman and the Hooded Men of Belsen, 1945

Cole travelled widely, recording the aftermath of the war in Malta, Greece, Germany and the Far East. Cole's work consistently addressed the suffering of human beings, and in three oil paintings he bears witness to conditions in Belsen at liberation. Cole did not return to Britain until the spring of 1946, having witnessed the horrors of Belsen concentration camp as well as Japanese prisoner of war camps in Singapore. Cole was married to Barbara Price, a former friend of Dylan Thomas and the star witness in what one newspaper called "the trial of the century", in which "the Prostitutes' Padre" Harold Davidson, Rector of Stiffkey, was accused of immorality. 

Leslie Cole, One of the Death Pits, Belsen SS guards collecting bodies, 1945

"The shock of Belsen was never to be forgotten. First of all was the ghastly smell of typhus. The simply ghastly sight of skeleton bodies just flung out of the huts." (Doris Zinkeisen)

Doris Zinkeisen, Human Laundry (Belsen), 1945

Doris Zinkeisen (1898-1991) was born in Rosneath, Argyll, Scotland. Together with her sister Anna she studied at the Royal Academy Schools in London. She was a well-known society painter and exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. She also designed costumes and stage sets for the theatre throughout her career. During the Second World War, she joined the St John Ambulance Brigade and in 1944 was commissioned by the Red Cross to paint the work of doctors and nurses in north-west Europe. Zinkeisen arrived at Belsen in April 1945, just after the liberation. You can see more of her work at ArtInconnu.

Doris Zinkeisen, Belsen, April 1945

"I drew the dead and scarcely living people when Belsen concentration camp was overrun, and I witnessed at first hand all the other appalling horrors of war. To me, any attempt to explain in words the overall influence of this experience on my work appears to weaken what I endeavour to say in my painting or sculpture. It means so very much." (Eric Taylor)

Eric Taylor, A Living Skeleton at Belsen Concentration Camp, 1945

Eric Taylor (1909-1999) was born  in London. He trained at the Royal College of Art and the Central School of Art, and at the outbreak of war he was already an established painter and printmaker. In 1939, he enlisted to serve with the Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineers. He took part in the 1944 Normandy landings and crossed the Rhine into Germany. He was among the first liberators to arrive at Belsen. His drawings from 1944 and 1945 document the wreckage left behind by the war; these images of the aftermath of liberation culminated in the drawings he made at Belsen. Human degradation on such a scale was difficult to portray, and Taylor's most potent images focus on single figures. 

Eric Taylor, A Young Boy from Belsen Concentration Camp, 1945

"I made a drawing of a girl aged 22, and in return I offered her a cigarette. She took it and ate it whilst I was fumbling with my matches to give her a light. Conditions such as these are beyond anyone's power to explain away." (Edgar Ainsworth)

Edgar Ainsworth, Wera Berger aged 13 after a year in Ravensbrück (near Belsen), 1945

Edgar Ainsworth (1906-1975) was the Art Editor for Picture Post magazine. Ainsworth visited Bergen-Belsen three times in the months after it was liberated and recorded in his drawings and photographies the changes he saw among the people he met there. In September of 1945, Ainsworth published a number of his drawings in Picture Post along with an article that gave his witness account of life in the liberated camp. This articl was written in response to the ongoing Belsen Trials and to combat the sentiments of scepticism and indifference he had observed among some members of the general public.

Tullio Crali - Free Flights for Art Reasons

 Tullio Crali, Architecture, 1939

Tullio Crali (1910-2000) was born in the Bay of Kotor on the coast of Montenegro. His family lived in Zadar until 1922, when they returned to Italy, living at Gorizia. Aeroplanes fascinated Crali at an early age. He completed technical school training as an architect, and was a self-taught painter. Crali was initially influenced by works of Enrico Prampolini that he saw in a journal. He avidly read articles by Marinetti and made his first contacts with the Trieste Futurists in 1925, joining them in 1929. 

Tullio Crali, Acrobazie in cielo, 1930 

With works such as Acrobazie in cielo (above), Crali began working in the form of aeropainting. In 1930 Crali exhibited his first Futurist paintings in Gorizia. In 1931 he met Marinetti for the first time and a life-long friendship began. He exhibited in major Italian cities and explored new forms of avant-garde theatre and film-set design. Crali also worked in the architectural planning of air terminals and fashion design. In order to earn a living, he began working in graphic design and advertising. In 1932, Crali exhibited in aeropainting exhibitions in Paris and Brussels.

 Tullio Crali, Bombardamento urbano, 1935

In 1933, Crali spoke on "Man and the Machine"  at the Second Futurist Conference in Milan, and began to compose parolibera or "freeword" poetry. From about 1934 a significant change was to come over Crali’s aeropaintings. Nearly all Futurist aeropainters experienced the thrill of flight and the completely new perspectives it offered. Crali, however, went one step further and learnt to fly. He soon became a stunt pilot and joined the famous "Cavallino" fighter pilots at Gorizia:

Francesco Baracca was Italy’s top fighter ace scoring 34 kills. In recognition of his former cavalry regiment, Baracca adopted the embem of a prancing stallion - the Cavallino Rampante. Baracca’s mother, the Countess Paolina, later suggested to Enzo Ferrari to use the stallion as an emblem for his newly founded car company.

The pilot’s unique yet ever-changing view from the cockpit, the swirling, whirling rolls and dives, the sensation of spinning through the air, were all incorporated in his aeropaintings such as Incuneandosi nell'abitato (Wedged into Town), one of Crali's best-known works today:

 Tullio Crali, Incuneandosi nell'abitato, 1936

Crali's paintings took on a pin-sharp realism and became the supreme interpretation of aeropainting. He exhibited at the 1936 Venice Biennale and was selected, with fellow Futurists Enrico Prampolini, Gerardo Dottori and Ernesto Thayaht, to exhibit at the Berlin Olympics. By that time, Crali had become one of the leading figures of Italian Modernism and its association with Fascism. 

 Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini steering airplane, 1935 (LIFE Magazin)

In 1937, Crali moved to Rome. Because of the importance of his aeropaintings he was granted "free flight for art reasons" by the Italian Airlines and recorded his flight impressions over Tunisia, Libya, Dalmatia and the Aegean Sea. 

 Tullio Crali, La Tour Eiffel, 1980

Moving to Paris in the early 1950's, Crali was invited to lecture at the Sorbonne on the life of Marinetti. He moved to Milan in 1958 where he remained (apart from a five-year period teaching at the Italian Academy of Fine Arts, Cairo) for the rest of his life. After the death of Marinetti and the liberation of Italy, both in 1944, Futurism ceased to be an entity. Although post-war Futurism came to nothing, Crali was in favour of the idea and personally strove to revive aeropainting - to the extent of issuing the manifesto Orbital Art (1969) calling for new works on a cosmic scale. Some 25 years after the end of Futurism, this was probably the final Futurist manifesto. 

 Tullio Crali, Monoplano Jonathan, 1988

To Crali the lessons and ideals of Futurism were all-important even though the movement itself no longer existed. For example, Monoplano Jonathan (above) is one of the few truly Futurist paintings that depicts modern jet fighters. The ultimate Futurist aeropainter for some sixty years, Crali believed in the machine in all its manifestations but held the aeroplane supreme as "the machine that realised the myth of Icarus, the ever-present dream of man". 

American aviator, writer and artist Steve Poleskie with Tullio Crali (right), at the time the last living Futurist artist, at the opening of Poleskie's exhibition in Milan (1983). 

A Futurist to the end, Tullio Crali died on 5th August 2000. In 2001, forty five of his paintings were acquired by the Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto. You can see more of his work in my Flickr set.