MARIE-LOUISE MOTESICZKY (Vienna 1906 - 1996 London), Landscape with Aqueduct

MARIE-LOUISE MOTESICZKY*
(Vienna 1906 - 1996 London)
Landscape with Aqueduct
oil/canvas, 55,5 x 61 cm
Provenance: Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust, Chiswick auctions GB, Fine Arts Widder Vienna

ESTIMATE € 3.000 - 4.000
START € 3.000

Austrian painter of the 20th century. Representative of Expressionism, belongs to the forgotten generation. Her father came from the Hungarian nobility, her mother from a Jewish Viennese banking family. She was the sister of the inventor of the radio tube Robert Hermann von Lieben, her grandmother Anna von Lieben was one of the first patients of Sigmund Freund. Her brother Karl Motesiczky, psychoanalyst and resistance fighter, died in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943. She attended the private art school of the Czech artist Carola Machotka in Den Haar from 1922. Studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main with Max Beckmann, was her mentor and lifelong friend. Held high regard for her and saw her as a successor to Paula Modersohn-Becker. After the Anschluss, she fled to Amersham via the Netherlands and London in 1938, and lived in London from 1945. Deepened her acquaintance with Oskar Kokoschka. Became a friend and lover of Elias Canetti. Took many trips, including to Mexico, where she met her childhood friend Wolfgang Paalen shortly before his death. Received late recognition in 1985 through an exhibition at the London Goethe Institute on the initiative of Hilde Spiel, another exhibition in 1994 at the Austrian Gallery Belvedere. Created unadorned portraits of her mother, haunting self-portraits, and still lifes and landscapes rich in symbolism.

My longing is to paint beautiful pictures, to be happy through it and to make other people happy," said Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, explaining her tireless, always very personal, artistic work wich she continued into old age. For a long time, the artist was only perceived indirectly, as standing in the shadow of great men: as a student of Max Beckmann, an acquaintance of Oskar Kokoschka or a lover of Elias Canetti. Only as a result of an extremely successful solo exhibition at the Goethe Institute in London in 1985 and a retrospective at the Austrian Gallery at Belvedere Vienna in 1994 and another at the Vienna City Museum in 2007 did she receive the place in the canon of great Austrian artists of the 20th century that she undoubtedly deserves. Her oeuvre, which consists mainly of still lifes, self-portraits and portraits and is committed to a constantly changing, increasingly lyrical, fractured expressionism, can definitely be considered autobiographical. She received a good artistic education at art schools in Vienna, The Hague, Frankfurt am Main, Paris and Berlin. From 1927 she studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt in the master class of Max Beckmann, who remained her lifelong friend and mentor. She worked intensively in search of her own style; the hope of artistic recognition at home, however, was interrupted with the annexation of Austria in 1938. Motesiczky fled with her mother – her father had died young – first to the Netherlands and then to England, where she lived and worked until her death.
Landscapes by the artist are rather rare. Similar to her still lifes, the alpine valley with the aqueduct in the foreground is filled with a gentle glow and quiet poetry. The river bubbles cheerfully through the sunlit, tree-lined valley, while the view to the rear, beyond the village, is lost in the vastness of the hazy mountains.

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