Marie-Louise Von Motesiczky: Catalogue Raisonne of the Paintings

When Marie-Louise von Motesiczky was only three
years old the family was struck by tragedy. While on a
hunting outing Edmund suddenly fell ill with a twisted
intestine. He died a few days later, on 12 December 1909,
and was buried at the Döblinger Friedhof. Apart from
a brief engagement to the civil servant K. von Erhard 17
shortly after her husband’s death Henriette did not enter
into any other relationships. For a while she found a close
friend in the fatherly figure of Albert Figdor (1843–1927),
a banker who had amassed one of the largest and most
important private arts-and-crafts collections of its time,
consisting of textiles, furniture, tools, cutlery, jewellery,
glassware and ceramics from medieval times to the nineteenth
century. 18 She also remained part of a large social
circle. All the same, as a widow, Henriette repeatedly
suffered from depression, retreating to her bed for days
and leaving the children to their own devices.
Despite this early loss Motesiczky remembered her
childhood as protected and herself as a self-sufficient and
independent child (figs 12 and 13). Yet the unlimited freedom
her mother allowed her proved to be a burden for, as
Motesiczky recalled, she was neither challenged to achieve
a target nor able to develop her own will and resistance
in the face of adversity. 19 Fortunately, she found a lifelong
friend and ‘second mother’ 20 in Marie Hauptmann, a shoemaker’s
daughter from Bohemia. During her first position
in a family in Vienna, the young Marie Hauptmann had
become pregnant by the son of the house. The child had
been given away and Marie Hauptmann accepted a new
position in the Motesiczky household as Marie-Louise’s
wet-nurse. Marie, whose nickname, ‘Ritschi’, was more
commonly used, spent her life working for and living
with the family. Although she spoke no English, she would
eventually follow the Motesiczky family to England. When
she died in 1954, aged sixty-nine, Elias Canetti called her
‘this best person you have ever known’. 21 With Marie in
Doorway, after 1954 (no. 134), Motesiczky paid a touching
posthumous tribute to this ‘kind, funny, innocent,
constantly working, wonderful woman’ who had given her
life to the Motesiczkys. 22 Her daughter, who kept in touch
with her own mother, is the subject of Hilda, c. 1937 (no. 44).
Within the family Marie-Louise soon became known
as ‘Piz’. This nickname was coined when she had grown
so quickly that a relative compared her height to that of
the Swiss mountain Piz Buin. It stuck with her and was
used by relatives and close friends for the rest of her life.
A few people had their own special names for Marie-Louise.
Ritschi, for example, preferred ‘Wepslein’, while Oskar
Kokoschka would call her ‘Florizel’; she in turn invented
her own series of nicknames: she addressed her mother
as ‘Has’, ‘Zipfi’ or ‘Bulli’ and her brother Karl as ‘Mucki’.
Marie-Louise’s education did not follow any guidelines
but was haphazard, short, of poor quality and lacked
discipline. 23 Henriette von Motesiczky did not take a
great interest in her schooling and was, at first, content
with providing private teachers. One of these ‘completely
impossible private tutors’ 24 made his pupil read the
Nibelungenlied in Old High German for a whole winter.
Only as late as 1916 did Marie-Louise enter a school, the
Öffentliches Mariahilfer Mädchenlyzeum in the sixth
district of Vienna. She stayed for only four years, leaving in
1920, when she was just thirteen. Her school career did not
get off to a promising start. She lagged behind the other
Fig. 12 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky as a child, photograph, early 1910s
(Motesiczky archive)
20 the life of marie-louise von motesiczky