Southampton City Art Gallery - 28 September – 9 December 2007
Marie-Louise von Motesiczky
The painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky was born in Vienna in 1906. Leaving Vienna after the Anschluss in 1938, she spent the rest of her life in England. Her artistic career, which spans seventy years, began in the 1920s when she visited Max Beckmann's master class in Frankfurt. Several critically acclaimed exhibitions, especially in London and Vienna, have acquainted the public with Motesiczky's oeuvre which comprises portraits, self-portraits, still-lifes, landscapes and allegorical paintings.
For more information go to www.southampton.gov.uk/leisure/arts/sotonartgallery
Museum Moderner Kunst, Passau - 2 June – 9 September 2007
Marie-Louise von Motesiczky
The Museum Moderner Kunst in Passau will show Marie-Louise von Motesiczky’s centenary exhibition in its beautiful surroundings in the old part of the town.
For more information go to www.mmk-passau.de
Wien Museum, Vienna - 8 March – 20 May 2007
Who is Marie-Louise von Motesiczky? Malerin zwischen Wien und London
While Marie-Louise von Motesiczky’s life spans nearly a century, her work mirrors a fragile world between Vienna and London. The artist grew up in a wealthy aristocratic Jewish family in turn-of-the-century Vienna. Well-known musicians, artists and writers were frequent visitors to the family. Her grandmother, Anna von Lieben, was one of Sigmund Freud’s earliest patients.
Motesiczky’s hopes for an artistic career were dashed by the National Socialists. She left Austria with her mother in March 1938, eventually settling in London where she became part of a circle of exiles and met the writer Elias Canetti with whom she had a long relationship. Canetti showered her work with praise: “You are a very great painter and, whether you want it or not, the world will come to know it. Every picture that you will paint will enter the history of painting.”
Motesiczky’s paintings show the immediate surroundings of the artist. She especially liked to explore human beings and their faces with her brush.
For more information go to www.wienmuseum.at
To celebrate the opening of the exhibition in Vienna the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust held a reception at Palais Todesco, the family’s former home opposite the opera, on 6 March 2006, where friends and family of Marie-Louise gathered.
The artist Milein Cosman, a friend of Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, was interviewed by the Austrian television ORF. Frederick Baker’s film on the artist’s family, Die Motesiczkys. Stilleben mit Cello, Jagdhund und Staffelei, was shown in ORF 2 on 11 March 2007 and 3sat on 2 April 2007.
Museum Giersch, Frankfurt am Main - 24 Sept 2006 – 11 Feb 2007
Marie-Louise von Motesiczky
In 1927/28 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky visited Max Beckmann's master class at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. The German painter was to become a life-long artistic influence and friend. Motesiczky’s experiences as Beckmann’s pupil are recorded in the text Max Beckmann als Lehrer. Erinnerungen einer Schülerin des Malers, first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
The magnificent villa on the Schaumainkai hosted an exhibition of 76 paintings and numerous drawings, thus, for the first time in Germany, giving a comprehensive overview of the oeuvre of an artist who must be counted among the most important artists of the twentieth century.
For more information go to www.museum-giersch.de
Tate Liverpool - 11 April – 13 August 2006
Marie-Louise von Motesiczky
Celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Marie-Louise von Motesiczky's birth, this exhibition brought the work of this acclaimed, yet relatively unknown, artist to a much wider audience than ever before. The exhibition presented around 70 paintings and a number of drawings, exploring the transition from her hard-edged realist style of the twenties to the poetic realism of her later work. Motesiczky is particularly known for her portraits, including compelling self-portraits and a moving series devoted to her ageing mother recording her decline.
For more information go to www.tate.org.uk/liverpool
Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna - 1994
Marie-Louise von Motesiczky
Two years before she died, Motesiczky experienced a final triumph in her native Austria. Organized by Peter Black, the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna held a retrospective exhibition of Motesiczky's work in spring 1994. Fifty works, mainly paintings but also a few drawings, from seven decades were shown, spanning Motesiczky’s entire career. The accompanying catalogue, which sold out completely, brought together two earlier essays on Motesiczky by Ernst Gombrich and Benno Reifenberg. In the wake of the exhibition, the Österreichische Galerie also purchased Self-portrait with Comb, 1926, its second Motesiczky painting. The exhibition went on to be shown at the Manchester City Art Galleries later in the year.
Goethe Institut, London - 1985
Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, Paintings Vienna 1925 - London 1985
Initiated by the Viennese author and former cultural affairs correspondent in London for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Hilde Spiel, the show assembled 73 paintings from numerous public and private collections as well as the artist’s possession. The sizeable catalogue contained introductions to Motesiczky’s work by Günter Busch, the former director of the Kunsthalle Bremen, Richard Calvocoressi (then a curator at the Tate Gallery and now the director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh) and the art historian Ernst Gombrich who greatly admired her paintings.
|
