Marie-Louise von Motesiczky

Marie Louise von Motesiczky, 1988

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (October 24, 1906 – June 10, 1996) was an Austrian painter painter who lived in Britain from 1939 onwards, becoming a naturalised subject in 1948.

Early Life

Marie-Louise von Motesicky was born in Vienna in 1906 to Edmund von Motesiczky (1866-1909) and Henriette von Lieben (1882-1978). Edmund was the illegitimate son of Franz Ritter von Hauer (1822-99), Director of the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, but was given the surname of his mother’s husband Matthias Motesiczky and partly brought up by the family of the conductor Franz Schalk (1863-1931). Edmund had considerable musical talent, becoming a gifted (amateur) cellist. Her mother, Henriette von Lieben, came from one of the most wealthy and cultured families in the Habsburg Empire. They had donated many of the artworks in 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. In order to marry Henriette, who was Jewish, in 1903, he renounced Catholicism to enter the Protestant Church, which Henriette did likewise. Their two children Karl (1904-43) and Marie-Louise were baptised as Lutherans.

The von Liebens were steeped in the social and intellectual life of Vienna as well as having an impact on the early history of psychoanalysis. Marie-Louise’s grandmother Anna von Lieben (née Todesco), was one of Sigmund Freud’s patients in the 1890s, referred to under the pseudonym of ‘Cäcilie M’. Henriette’s family divided their time between central Vienna and the Villa Todesco at Hinterbrühl in the Wienerwald south-west of Vienna, where Marie-Louise was to spend the summers of her childhood and early adult life.

Work

After leaving school at only thirteen, Marie-Louise attended art classes in Vienna, The Hague, Frankfurt, Paris and Berlin. In 1927/28 she was invited by Max Beckmann to join his master class at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Beckmann had been introduced to the Motesiczky family in 1920 and it was through them that he met the singer Mathilde von Kaulbach (‘Quappi’, 1904-86), who became his second wife in 1925. Beckmann was a lifelong friend and mentor to Marie-Louise whose influence can be seen in her early portraiture and still-lifes, and the allegorical subjects from the 1940s onwards. The second great influence on her work after Max Beckmann was Oskar Kokoschka. Her large circle of friends also included the sculptor Marie Duras, the art historian Sir Ernst Gombrich and the artist Milein Cosmann.

The day after the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria into the German Third Reich) on 12 March 1938, Marie-Louise and her mother Henriette left Vienna, going to Holland where Marie-Louise’s aunt, Ilse von Leembruggen, lived in the Hague. There she had her first solo exhibition in January 1939, but soon left with her mother for England, travelling via Switzerland. In London they renewed their acquaintance with Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) and met the writer Elias Canetti (1905-94) with whom Marie-Louise was to develop a relationship that lasted for more than thirty years, and a correspondence that continued until 1992 . Her brother Karl had stayed behind in Vienna; he was able to send a substantial part of their possessions to London, including Marie-Louise’s paintings. These were eventually installed in the house in Amersham in Buckinghamshire, bought by Marie-Louise and her mother in 1941 to be out of reach of bombing raids on London. Wherever Marie-Louise lived from then on – in Amersham and then in Hampstead – space was provided not only for her studio, but for Canetti’s library from Vienna and Canetti himself.

Karl’s hopes that he could continue with his medical studies in Vienna as a pre-requisite for becoming a psychoanalyst, were immediately confounded. He used the family property at Hinterbrühl as a meeting place for anti-Nazi resistance and to hide Jewish refugees. In 1942 he was betrayed, imprisoned in Gestapo headquarters in Vienna, then sent to Auschwitz where he died of typhus in the hospital block on 25 June 1943. His last communication was a request from Auschwitz via the Red Cross to friends in Vienna for his cello (like his father, Karl was a keen amateur cellist), and a food parcel. His memory was honoured in August 2019 by the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, who designated the Motesiczkys’ former property at Hinterbrühl, as one of the ‘Houses of Life’ to acknowledge the sacrifice that Karl Motesiczky and his companions made in sheltering those fleeing from or resisting Nazism. The property was restituted to Marie-Louise and her mother after the War and sold by them in the mid-fifties to the international charity, SOS Kinderdorf, which runs a chain of ‘villages’ worldwide for humanitarian work with children.

In Britain Marie-Louise joined the Artists’ International Association and exhibited at the Czechoslovak Institute in London in 1944. After the War she rented a flat in London while her mother stayed in Amersham until 1960, when they moved into a large house at 6 Chesterford Gardens in Hampstead that was to be their home for the rest of their lives. Two solo exhibitions in the Hague and Amsterdam in 1952 were followed by others in Germany and Austria in the 1950s and 60s. After the move to Chesterford Gardens Marie-Louise’s time was increasingly dominated by the demands of caring for her mother. This prompted what was in many respects her most remarkable body of work: a series of unflinching portraits of her mother, expressive of the ravages of age but also the deep emotional bond between the two women. They showed the development of a distinctive style and subject matter of Marie-Louise’s own, moving on from the influence of Beckmann and Kokoschka.

Motesiczky's breakthrough in the UK occurred in 1985, with a major retrospective at the Goethe Institute in London , which generated much acclaim and saw her reputation as a major Austrian artist cemented. However, on the subject of exhibiting, as The Independent wrote, "Motesiczky never needed to sell her paintings, indeed she preferred to keep them around her". An aristocratic disdain for the marketplace meant that, while she half welcomed exhibitions, they remained uncomfortable experiences." The retrospective was accompanied by essays from Gunther Busch, Richard Calvocoressi and Ernst Gombrich. The Tate Gallery acquired three paintings and the exhibition travelled to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The last major exhibition of her lifetime took place at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna in 1994. Marie-Louise died in London on 10 June, 1996. Her ashes were consigned to the family grave at the Döblinger Cemetery in Vienna.

At her death in 1996 the collection, along with the bulk of her estate, passed to the Trust set up in 1992 for the preservation and promotion of her work, support of the arts and other charitable objects. It received charitable status on 21 November 1996 as the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust. A centenary exhibition was organised in 2006-07, starting at Tate Liverpool and travelling to Frankfurt, Vienna and Passau, then to Southampton Art Gallery in Britain. This was followed by the publication of a biography in 2007, a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s paintings in 2009 and two exhibitions at Galerie St Etienne in New York in 2010 and 2014. In recent years the Trust has been making donations of Marie-Louise’s work to public collections. She is represented in local, regional and national museums in Britain, the Republic of Ireland, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and the USA. The great majority of Marie-Louise’s drawings and sketchbooks, the archive of her and her family’s papers, along with other documentary items connected to her life and work, have been presented to Tate where the Archive Gallery at Tate Britain has been named for her.

Of her life in art, she once remarked “If you could only paint a single good picture in your lifetime, your life would be worthwhile.”

Diana Athill wrote about her friendship with Motesiczky in her memoir 'Somewhere Towards the End' (Granta, 2008).

External links

• Motesiczky Charitable Trust
• Tate Archive
• 11 artworks by or after Marie-Louise von Motesiczky at the Art UK site