Portrait power
Peter Black
Tate Liverpool is the first venue for a memorial exhibition of the painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (born Vienna 1906, died London 1996). Motesiczky was from a wealthy and cultivated Jewish background. She was a friend (from 1920) and pupil of Max Beckmann in Frankfurt (1927–8). She left Austria in 1938, settling in London, where she lived an isolated life. It is not that it was lonely. In fact, she had a very rich existence socially, especially after her move to Hampstead, but German art was little regarded in post-war England. Her training added independent study, in Paris and elsewhere, to a few terms at Frankfurt with her master, Beckmann. He told her she might become greater than Paula Modersohn-Becker but she never established a career. She was just finding the confidence to exhibit when the Nazis marched in, and when she reached London she became submerged in its quite different culture. Later, she had shows of importance — the Beaux Arts Gallery 1960, the Vienna Secession in 1966, and Bremer Kunsthalle 1967. At each appearance she was greeted as a discovery. Reviews of her retrospectives in London (Goethe-Institut 1985), the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, 1986, and Vienna (Belvedere 1994) also welcomed a major talent, and the moment of revelation is about to recur.
Like Van Gogh, she sold scarcely a single painting in her lifetime. The high survival rate is a tremendous advantage, but proves a mixed blessing in this show. She was a wonderful and complicated person: controlling but inconsistent in suppressing aspects of her work. Alive, she made the selector’s task very difficult, but the freedom now possible allows misrepresentation. An exhibition depends, above all, on the selection. A memorial show should present the artist’s strengths, with works from each category in proportion to the output. Not all artists are prolific, and overall scale is a crucial indication of character. Marie-Louise’s early ambition was to be remembered for a single painting, but here there are too many.
The hang does not master the two adjoining spaces. The larger gallery is partly hung thematically, partly chronologically. There are three major groups here: early masterpieces, self-portraits and the great series of objective portraits of her mother Henriette in old age from 1959–78, pictures which themselves make the journey to Liverpool worthwhile. It is touching also to see her anxious self-image fixing us again with her stare, her lips parted as if talking from the picture. Some contain dramas of self-awareness at life-stages thinking about marriage, or reaching 60, for example, in the ‘Self-portrait with Pears’.
The second gallery has some groupings, but is frankly confused, with nonsensical juxtapositions, and no chronology. Early works placed here include a powerful landscape: the very grey, almost surreal ‘Street, Hinterbrühl’, in the artist’s earliest style, with paint heaped on. This is one of several gems buried in this section. It is good to see the drawings which the artist always hid, and which potentially provide material for a whole gallery. Only a small group is included as an afterthought, with insufficient attention to their functions and relationships with paintings.
Motesiczky’s great strength was the portrait: the heads of friends and anybody she could get to sit for her. She had an extraordinary sensitivity to character. Her portraits of intellectuals — for example, Iris Murdoch, Elias Canetti, Miriam Lane Rothschild — strike home. More haunting images are those of anonymous figures she chose to paint, such as the ‘Dwarf’ or the ‘Spanish Girl’. Her still-lives show another dimension of her curiosity about people, celebrating her creaturely enjoyment of flowers, wine or books. In some we feel the strong presence of people close to the artist, with whom the objects form links.
A disturbing aspect is the inclusion of five or six dramatic and personal works (records of bad dreams?) never before shown. Their proper context, along with the funny but flawed portrait of the ‘Psychoanalyst’, would be an article. They are not in the catalogue. Some must have been chosen in order to reveal — now it is safe — the story of her long and painful relationship with Elias Canetti. There are two strong portraits of this solid figure, but unfinished pictures reduce the impact of the others. She characteristically introduced her own story through still-lives, some of which allude in a delightful and subtle way to her relationships. An example not included is the beautiful small and very thinly painted ‘Orchid’ in the late Lord Croft’s Collection. In it an exotic bloom is juxtaposed with a thick book inscribed ‘Pio’, her nickname for Canetti.
The substantial catalogue is evidence of the energy and resources brought to bear on Marie-Louise’s work in the ten years of the Motesiczky Trust’s operation. This is the best publication on the artist, containing the most complete record there is, with good entries for the paintings, but it falls short of providing an assessment of her work, and I see myth-making at work.
It has the same lack of focus as the exhibition. The ‘core’ selection is no tighter than that on the walls. But the balance or lack of it — between biography and criticism is the main problem. How often have we seen the works of Van Gogh displayed alongside quotations from the letters to Theo, which have become the only commentary on his works? So with MarieLouise the danger is of her being pushed into a mould that distorts her into a perpetually unrequited lover, dominated by Beckmann. He nurtured her amazing visual awareness, but it was acute, and personal to her. Birgit Sander’s article about Beckmann and Marie-Louise is valuable but obscures her strengths by reproducing only his paintings. Comparison with Beckmann confers status, but reduces her individuality. To hear that landscapes are ‘poorly represented’ in her work is irritating when there are works of extraordinary beauty not shown, notably ‘Finchley Road by Night’ in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. That she made so few is not sad if it draws attention to her strength as a portrait painter.
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