Marielouise Motesiczky

Vocation

Austrian painter. She was born to an aristocratic family. After leaving school aged only 13, Marie attended art schools in various locations around Europe including Vienna, Paris (at the Montparnasse Painting Academy) and Berlin. In 1928, Max Beckmann invited her to join his masterclass at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, where she honed her craft and the two became lifelong friends. Motesiczky spent the next 10 years developing her craft but, as her family included Jewish descent, she had to flee the Nazi annexation of Vienna in 1938. Motesiczky, accompanied by her mother Henriette, fled to London via Amsterdam where she joined the Artists' International Association and contributed to some of their exhibitions; her first solo exhibition followed in London in 1944. During this period she also became romantically involved with the writer Elias Canetti, who was to remain a close companion and friend for many years to come. Following the end of the war, Motesiczky exhibited her paintings in many European institutions and she continued to work from her house in London, where she lived only with her mother and a single maid. Her mother became the subject of many of her paintings after 1960, with Motesiczky chronicling her encroaching frailty in paintings such as The Old Song and From Night into Day. Motesiczky also painted many figurative ‘fantasy paintings’, dream-like paintings which blurred fantasy and reality but which alluded to her own experience and were loaded with personal symbolism. Motesiczky's major 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. Apart from several works in well-known public collections, she kept the main body of her work in her own house. She died in London on June 10, 1996. Link to Wikipedia biography