Maria Lassnig. The Ninth Decade - Mumok

Maria Lassnig. The Ninth Decade
Wolfgang Drechsler
“Maria Lassnig’s preoccupation with the inner world of bodily sensations has developed to such an extent that she is now
quite sanguine about what she had cause to lament in the 1970s: ‘The better one’s physical condition, the more deeply one
feels the physical sensations, the more exhausted the spirit, the more realistic the painting.’ Today she can choose freely and
the ‘drastic’ pictures, as she calls them, emerge at the same time as her bodily sensation pictures, such as the Malflüsse (Flow
of Painting) and the Beziehungen (Relationships). She consciously creates ‘illusions of missed marriages or motherhood’ in
a ‘drastic’ realism, just as she allows other works painted concurrently to assume their own form.” 1
This is how I concluded the essay I wrote for the major Maria Lassnig retrospective held at the
Museum of the Twentieth Century in 1999. Ten years on, the observations made then seem more apposite than ever, even
if some may require revision or further explanation. Lassnig has long understood what it means to have two or more sides
to your character. In the course of her preparations for a show at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 2003, she decided to rename her
Doppelselbstporträt of 2000 Zwei Arten zu sein (Two Ways of Being). Whereas the figure on the right is clearly identifiable
as Lassnig herself, the bulbous, strangely bloated looking creature on the left relies on the “self-portrait” of the title to be
recognizable as such—at least by those unfamiliar with Lassnig and her work.
“People wouldn’t know it if I didn’t tell them that these are body paintings. In reality it is only because of my insistence,
because I say it is so, that they have to comprehend this as body awareness. Left to themselves, they wouldn’t see it at all,
especially when looking at the real bodily sensation paintings. [. . .] In contrast to my colleagues, it is important for me to
tell them what my paintings are about [. . .]. I invented this, I found this, and its being so difficult posed a challenge to me.
I am well aware that others can’t see it. I believe it is difficult for people who know nothing about me to see my pictures as
paintings about bodily sensation. They see only fragmented beings, or simply lines which could perhaps end in something
concrete and real.” 2
To read these new works, to see what is special and what is new, it makes sense first to look at the
past. The first body-awareness drawings were made sixty years ago in 1948/49, just a few years after Lassnig graduated from
the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. As a student, she had had no access to the greatest accomplishments of modernism—
because the Nazi regime decried it as “degenerate art.” Yet even in the post-war years, Austrian artists for many years found
it difficult to gain admission to the international art scene. Lassnig’s first works were true to the realism she had been
taught, although her striving for an idiom of her own is apparent even here. Even while still a student, she tried hard to
move beyond tonal harmony—the only technique the Academy would tolerate—and to work with bolder, more strident
colors. Looking back, she described her in-depth exploration of color and arduous acquisition of her own individual color
perception as her “first intellectual experience.” 3 “I called it ‘vertical color perception’ or ‘absolute color perception.’ I would
fix my gaze at a point of color till the ‘local color’ disappeared and the frightening relativity of color gave way to a wider
range of options. The choice of color is not free, of course, but rather dependent on the degree of sublimation one can
achieve at that moment. [. . .] I sought to augment a restrained passion by sustaining and exalting a spot, a patch of color,
to such an extent that either an absolute gray or a pure color at odds with reality resulted. Thus a green turned into a red.
[. . .] At first, the color was attached to a ‘realistic’ frame or was ‘placed’; the intensive grappling with color of my early years
was of great help to me later on.” 4
Lassnig then proceeded to fast-track her way through all the twentieth century’s many “isms”: expressionism, cubism,
surrealism, followed by the Art Informel she encountered while in Paris in 1951 and promptly reinterpreted to meet her
own individual needs. Lassnig’s concerns as an artist and underlying existentialism in fact ran counter to the aspirations of
Art Informel, especially to the Tachistic eruptions of the postwar period. Her own “informal” pictures are neither gestures,
nor calligraphy, nor action painting; and far from being a barely suppressed attempt to let off steam, are more a conscious
exercise in restraint, concentration, and reflection. Boldly applied strips of color that look as though they are about to
shoot off the edge of the canvas are thwarted in mid-flight, forced back into the middle, captured, chastened. The free
forms were never an end in themselves, however, but even then were shaped by corporeality, as Lassnig herself must have
realized. Her claim that “non-figurative art, too, is not an absence, nor a denunciation of the world. It is much more a con-
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centration of its entire potential and contradictions” 5 —made in her manifesto to the exhibition Unfigurative Malerei
(Non-figurative Painting) which she and Arnulf Rainer organized at the Künstlerhaus in Klagenfurt in November 1951—
can certainly be interpreted in this way. Lassnig’s informal phase was definitely not a case of her turning her back on the
world, but was rather an important stage in her exploration of the reality of bodily sensations, a milestone on the path
that would eventually lead to the concretization of her own individual world. Lassnig remarked on this in an interview in
1980: “I come after all from a tradition of looking, in other words from a visual tradition, and then I began looking inside
myself—which was actually quite a radical thing to do, was true avant-gardism.” 6
To translate bodily sensations that cannot be seen, but are certainly felt, into something visually
perceptible, Lassnig used the vocabulary of Art Informel, developing a linear system that can then be interpreted
figuratively; hence her Statische Meditation (Static Meditation) became a Kinderwagenform (Pram Shape), both of 1952.
This concentration on the line came hand in hand with a radical renunciation of color. Aware that she was in imminent
peril of becoming ensnared in the sterility of abstraction, Lassnig felt “a strong urge to paint succulent realities. But the
succulent fleshy hues were soon sublimated to ‘absolute horror,’ to bodies composed of patches of color, to portraits of
friends, parents, and me, rendered as ‘head units.’ Dispensing with physiognomic niceties such as eyes, nose, and mouth,
the head was partitioned and the patches of color of the ‘absolute horror’ that had not been adequately evaluated earlier
became plated cheeks, plated brows, and cylinder-like necks, slapped onto the background.” 7
So in one respect, at least, tracking down another aspect of the inside world necessitates a return to, and more intensive
exploration of the outside world. Once its limits have been plumbed, the outer shell that is the body is experienced as
the sum of all those patches of color. The result is that color takes on ever greater significance, exploding the contours of
the face and body plates until they fill almost the entire canvas, as in Quadratisches Körpergefühl (Square Body Sensation,
1960). Whereas ten years earlier, the space surrounding it had closed in on the body, pressing it into lumps or clusters
of color, that same body now threatens to displace the surrounding space altogether. The effect anticipates what Lassnig
would say about the line pictures she produced over a year later: “Expansiveness, extravagant circumlocution had been
important to my understanding of art since 1961. The shoulders span two whole meters, from one corner of the picture
to the other; the middle of the body is squeezed to an hourglass or stretched apart from one door to the other.” 8
Titles such as Tod mit Ohr (Death with Ear) or Harlekin Selbstporträt (Harlequin Self-portrait), both of 1961, send the
viewer on a wild goose chase after an ear or a likeness of the artist. Yet these titles should be read instead as a product of
the associations the pictures trigger in Lassnig herself. Even more important is that, in these works, Lassnig succeeds in
lending her body-awareness painting still more concrete form. The bodily sensations that in 1960 were still dissipating
are here distilled in a few crucial details. Pressure points, tension, compression, stretching—even the tiniest sensations
are recorded on canvas. Lassnig follows her body with her gaze turned inwards—“I do everything with closed eyes” 9 —
and is attentive to its every utterance. As she herself once put it, she has to agonize “between vague sensations and vague
possibilities of expressing these, between round and angular lines, between right and left, between further forward and
further back, between circumlocution and incisiveness.” 10
Lassnig draws on the experience she acquired back then in some of her more recent works. Nearly monochrome lines
in front of monochrome areas of color are here unmasked as a Traumpaar (Dream Couple) (2004), as Kinder als Krieger
(Children as Warriors), or simply as Zwei Figuren (Two Figures) (both 2006); as Frau und Mann (Woman and Man),
Schweinderln (Pigs), or as Was weiter? (What Next?) (all 2007).
The experience gained through her large-format line pictures of the 1960s and the resulting concentration on bodily
sensations enabled Lassnig to spend the following years reconnecting the inside and outside world. The more joined
up the dots and lines become, the more figurative they are. They are rendered not only verbally explicit in the title of the
piece, but formally explicit, too. In some works, figures are grouped together and viewed in relation to each other. Lassnig
calls these works her “narrative line pictures,” explaining that “a single figure in a picture is not a story. Two figures are a
story, lots of figures a drama.” 11 Drama, however, requires a stage, which is why the figures are depicted against a landscape
backdrop, or shut inside an interior.
Many of Lassnig’s more recent paintings also recall this phase; among them the two large panoramas of 2007/08 Hochzeitsbild
(Wedding Picture) and Nasenflucht in die Wasenschlucht—in the latter two protagonists are freeze-framed, while a
UFO-shaped figure with a distinctive nose flies over a lush meadow. The figure on the left, but even more so the one with a
porcine snout in the middle of 3 Arten zu sein (3 Ways of Being) of 2004, and Selbst mit Drachen (Self with Dragon) of the
following year also seem reminiscent of one of Lassnig’s 1960s phases. The reference here is to her “Monsters” of 1964, in
which painted bodily sensations are enriched by the addition of what Lassnig calls “sculpted feeling”: “The line pictures are
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ather directions, extensions, a lumpy sensation, or pressure, etc. In ‘Monsters’ I not only connected the pressure points
with lines, but also filled out the form with color. While features like the nose, the mouth etc. are present, there is no hair
and the color is totally uniform in tone. It is actually a recourse to tradition, to the perception of reality as we have learnt
to see it—what a person looks like, what I myself look like. Bodily sensation was the germinating idea, it was only supplemented
by memory. The distance between the nose and the mouth shifted, because one often feels as if nose and mouth
were fused together. That is why they look like monsters, because one doesn’t feel them as they really are. People usually
recognize me anyhow because the distances are somehow correct.” 12
But it is not just memory that is readmitted; actual seeing is, too. Lassnig henceforth scrutinizes
herself from within and without, both observations informing a single figure. Bodily sensation is no longer perceived
in isolation and then captured on canvas, but instead is viewed in relation to the outside world and first and foremost to
Lassnig’s own person and immediate surroundings—the arm leaning against the canvas in her Pfingstselbstporträt (Whitsun
Self-portrait) of 1969, for example. By 1970, the body-awareness project was doing so well that it was time to take stock
and to review what had been achieved so far. The three key issues for Lassnig when depicting bodily sensations are:
“1) whether realistic recollective associations are eliminated or applied, i.e. whether I paint the leg or the hand realistically
as I observe it, or as a rod the way I feel it, or as a wire, string, sausage; or not at all;
2) whether I screen myself off only from the outside world, i.e. when sitting at a table with apples, whether I really see it
and paint it, while seeing myself only as a pair of iron tongs clamped onto it, with my emotional shoulder blades projecting
into the optical table as tongs;
3) whether I mingle realistic recollective associations with freely invented sensations within a single picture, for instance
by painting the body like a fire-screen with realistic genitals attached. I draw or paint a picture in a certain position. When
sitting and leaning on one arm, for instance, you can feel the shoulder blade, but only the upper part of the arm itself—the
palms like the supports of a crutch. I feel the pressure points of my buttocks on the divan, my belly because it is filled like a
bag, my head sunk into the cardboard box of the shoulder blades, my skull open at the back, of my face only the nostrils as
big as a pig’s, and all over me a skin on fire, which will be painted red.” 13
Even today, therefore, we have an Eiserne Jungfrau und die fleischige Jungfrau (Iron Virgin and Fleshy Virgin) of 2004 and
(at least) 3 Ways of Being (3 Arten zu sein). As Lassnig herself has admitted, her re-engagement with the outside world
that began in the 1970s was triggered mainly by the dismay with which her “body-awareness paintings” were received in
America. Resorting to realism was a way of proving that she could really paint: “To me, realism has become the exception,
proof for those doubting my faculties, pleasure in the sensual outside world, sorrow about the oddities, and participation
in world affairs. 14 Yet this state of emergency appears to have exacerbated certain tendencies which were already present
in her works. Even bodily sensation needs a home to go to. It is not isolated, but rather part of a larger whole. It inhabits
a body sitting on a chair, at a table, in a studio. There are neighbors who have animals. There are new experiences, new
discoveries. While in New York, for example, she spotted some fruit wrapped in cellophane and promptly decided to
package herself in Selbstporträt unter Plastik (Self-portrait Encased in Plastic) of 1972.
Both the memory of this and the challenge of lending form to objects that are in fact transparent are again evident in
the gloomy “Basement Pictures” of 2005 und 2006: “I made the dark pictures with the plastic sheeting in the basement
of my house in Carinthia. It’s not so hot there in summer. In fact, it’s very pleasant. I found the painting difficult, however,
because the contours kept disappearing into the darkness. I gave the young models some plastic sheets that were lying
around and they had lots of fun with them. At first it was just fun, but in the end it produced something mystical.” 15 Love
of the outside world and the sheer joy of seeing on several occasions led Lassnig to draw and paint friends, acquaintances
and neighbors. These portraits provided her with time out from her exploration of bodily sensations in much the same
way as Piet Mondrian’s chrysanthemums provided him with light relief from his straight black lines and geometrical
shapes in primary colors only, while still making demands of his capacity to see and paint. Shortly after the turn of the
millennium, however, Lassnig was seized with a desire to go one step further and to stage realistic pictures. She asked
friends and neighbors to sit for her and to adopt poses ranging from the bizarre to the tragic. “In one picture [Welt-
zertrümmerer (The World Destroyer)] I gave a young man a pink inflatable globe and let out some of the air, which meant
that he could squish it. Unfortunately, there are always more than enough people who would like to smash and crush the
world. In another picture I painted him as a pedophile. Of course the man has never touched a child in his life, and in
reality is very shy, portly, kind.” 16
In other works she explored interpersonal relations. Lassnig readily admits that memory has become increasingly important
to her in recent years: “The outside world impinges so much on us today that it has become almost impossible to depict
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anything else. That’s why I make pictures from my imagination and memory. One example is the Adam and Eve series.
For these works, I went back to my time at the Academy; when I was twenty I painted people naked. Going back to my
youth like that was a challenge. Not reflecting on what I was doing, just doing it, just enjoying the beauty. I again enjoyed
the shininess of skin, the model with her red hair and her beautiful skin. For the picture Adam und Eva in Unterwäsche
(Adam and Eve in Underwear), I said to the two models that they should tease each other and quarrel and grab one another
around the neck. And although he really did go for her throat and she scratched him in return, there was never any sense
of malice. They didn’t manage to convey that—they couldn’t, because they don’t really hate each other. The two are a
couple—a real married couple. But that’s probably what gives the picture its intimacy. The shadow creates a secret connection
between the two, and of course their feet are all in a twist, too. Why I paint all this? Probably because I received too little
affection myself. It’s actually more like a dream, this is how good it must be. You can paint wish fulfillment dreams, too.” 17
Around 2000, Lassnig produced a series of works all in the same format (125 x 100 cm) showing herself
together with various animals, specifically with a duck, frog, bird, guinea-pig, hare, cat, and monkey. She had painted
her first series of self-portraits with animals in New York twenty-five years earlier. Her first realistic animal portrait was
of a neighbor’s sheepdog. This was followed by a fish which Lassnig is shown holding between her teeth, a large bird held
high above her head (Fliegen Lernen, Learning to Fly, 1976), a giant snake (Woman Laokoon, 1976), and a tiger (Mit einem
Tiger schlafen, Sleeping with a Tiger, 1975); in Selbstporträt mit Schwein (Self-portrait with Pig) of 1975 she portrays herself
showing a pig’s head on a spit. Writing about these works in the catalogue of the Venice Biennale 1980, Werner Hofmann
suggested that “The animals are presented as trophies, like fetishes with the power to protect us. The woman holding or
handling them appears as if transformed, as if entranced by her own power. Yet the awareness which imagines this encounter
knows its own limits, including the limits of its own bodily experience, and so seeks to show us not what it means to be a
fish, but rather the opposite of what it means to be human. Bodies come in all shapes and sizes, but each of us has only one
body and each of us is alone with his or her body.” 18
The later animals are smaller and cuter as a rule, and no one seeing them would dream of ascribing to them any supernatural
powers. On the contrary, they themselves seem to be in need of protection from the painter—even a painter as weary, battered,
bowed down, and visibly aged as this one is portrayed. The loose, if vigorous, brushwork evokes a sense of exhaustion,
but at the same time testifies to the experience gained from countless other portrayals of her own person.
Similarly uninhibited and carried by the force of memory is the figure who on the one hand enjoys Die Lebensqualität
(Quality of Life) (2001) swimming in Lake Wörth with a glass of red wine in her hand, although she is still not spared the
perils of the deeps. This is a form of irony that leaves the viewer unsure whether to laugh or cry—a seemingly unavoidable
either-or, as also in the infinitely more realistic Du oder ich (You or Me) of 2005: “The act is one of simple despair. The
picture is very yellow (much yellower than in the reproductions); it is a Van Gogh yellow. I paint myself like a yellow
lemon with a weapon. Old age is not really my subject—not yet! Death is, though. And death is something I have often
confronted . . . A friend of mine once called me just before he died and said: ‘I’ll soon be going up to heaven.’ The funny
thing is, people always believe they’ll be going up, whereas in reality they go down into the ground.” 19 Humor cannot
always be mobilized to tackle danger and inevitability. The sand in Die Sanduhr (The Hourglass) of 2001 waits for no one,
and we all become painfully aware of the signs of the times (Memento Mori, 2002) at some point in our lives.
An exhibition calling itself Das neunte Jahrzehnt (The Ninth Decade) and homing in on the works
of the last ten years in an oeuvre spanning more than sixty years is bound to raise the question of what constitutes mature
style. It was in an attempt to find an answer to this question that Artur Rosenauer, writing about the late works of Oskar
Kokoschka, sifted through recent art history in search of what he hoped would be illustrative examples. The best of these,
in his view, were those provided by old masters such as Titian, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt, with the possible addition
of Goya and Donatello—all artists whose late works evinced certain salient characteristics. Rosenauer argued that what
all these “mature stylists” have in common is an “independence of mind, enhanced self-assurance, and faith in themselves
reinforced by early recognition. This gives them the inner freedom and the courage needed to pursue those paths which
they, unlike their contemporaries, deem to be the right ones. The injunction to ‘be who you are’ is more important to
them than the latest trends. In a lesser talent, self-assurance may degenerate into routine or even be straitjacketing. But if
the potential is great and the horizon broad, it can open up new terrain into which the artist’s contemporaries are unlikely
to want to follow. As these considerations show, mature style is the complete opposite of mere epigonism. Mature style has
nothing to do with the desire to remain forever at the cutting edge, forever on the alert for the latest trend. What sets the
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works apart from others is their impatience with the limits of craftsmanship, an uninhibited approach to execution
such as can be achieved only through years of practice and extreme intimacy with the medium, and finally a simplicity
of expression which can be easily misunderstood. Mature artists can draw on the experience gained from earlier works—
experience which teaches them above all what to leave out. This, ultimately, is the source of their exceptional aplomb—
an aplomb all too easily misinterpreted as artistic despotism. Looking back does not preclude either progress or the
accumulation of new experience. The road actually taken is often one which points in a very different direction from
the era’s main arteries.” 20
Reviewing the twentieth century, Rosenauer detected a mature style not only in Kokoschka, but in Claude Monet, Pablo
Picasso, and Willem de Kooning. The last two featured alongside Joan Miró and Philip Guston in an exhibition on the
theme of mature style shown in Bremen in 1996. Explaining her concept in the catalogue of that show, curator María de
Corral described being fascinated by the way “some artists, faced with impending old age and acutely aware of their own
mortality, discover a new freedom—perhaps the only true freedom, which restores their faith in their own instincts and
leads to the rediscovery of their own idiom, their own artistic individuality, and so enables them, far removed from the
constraints of their time and whichever intellectual abstractions happen to be en vogue, to become the protagonists of
their own story.” 21
So when does mature style begin? This naturally varies from case to case. The first inklings of Picasso’s mature style, for
example, can be dated somewhere between 1953 and 1966, meaning between the ages of seventy-one and eighty-four,
depending on how his mature style is defined in the exhibition in question. Werner Spies draws the line there, where
Picasso begins taking “a legitimately historicist approach to his own styles.” 22 If the same method is applied to Maria
Lassnig, then clearly we should begin looking for her mature style in those drawings and paintings in which she begins to
address her own work. In the winter of 1984/85, Lassnig commenced work on a new series called Innerhalb und außerhalb
der Leinwand (Inside and Outside the Canvas), which may well have been inspired by the preparatory work she was doing
in the run-up to the first major retrospective of her paintings. The experience of being brought face to face with her own
oeuvre, of having to reassess earlier works, of carrying around canvases, and of organizing their shipment not only made
her aware of Die innige Verbindung von Maler und Leinwand (The Intimate Bond Between Painter and Canvas, 1986),
but also led to further reflection on the nature of the triangular relationship between work, subject, and artist. No matter
which of her works she is looking at, Lassnig almost always sees only herself. She sees herself in the form which stood for
her bodily sensations or her appearance at the time the work was produced. Yet she also sees, and indeed feels, herself as
someone who is now viewing the picture and the bodily sensations it formulates. The act of making contact with her own
oeuvre has resulted in still more works that address this clash of two different realities head on, among them a painting
called Mit Füßen (With Feet) of 1987/1989, in which the painter stands on her own picture (a motif which in Tierliebe,
Love of Animals, of 1998 was elaborated to encompass the act of painting itself as well as a surprising duplication of the
artist). The painter’s feet are clearly standing on what looks like an older body-awareness painting, even if the particular
painting never actually existed. It is as if the line pictures of the early 1960s had entered into a pact with the much less
constrained hand of the 1980s. As difficult as it is to draw the line, it is also true to say that, since the second major retrospective
of her works in Vienna in 1999, Maria Lassnig has produced an ever larger number of works which do indeed bear
the hallmarks of a mature style. If one sets aside the “dramatic worldview,” then a comment Werner Hofmann made about
the then 70-year-old Kokoschka in 1956 which Artur Rosenauer quotes in his essay may help shed some light on Lassnig’s
most recent output: “This mature style is no annex, but rather a rich fulfillment and a branching out, as also a deepening
and a sublimation of the dramatic worldview into one of universal significance.” 23 To which we could add: Lassnig’s mature
style is not just a rich fulfillment and a branching out, is not just a deepening and a sublimation, but also a continuation
and an enrichment of her unparalleled inventiveness. There is probably no artist in either the twentieth or the twenty-first
century to date who has succeeded in creating such a wealth of forms within such a relatively constant (and large, compared
with other oeuvres) thematic compass. And one last thought—the only mature styles deemed relevant today are
those of the Titans of art history, to whose illustrious circle not a single woman has yet been admitted.
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Notes:
1 Wolfgang Drechsler, “Über die innige Verbindung von Maler und Malerei,” in Maria Lassnig, exh. cat., Museum moderner Kunst
Stiftung Ludwig Wien; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes; Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain des Pays de la Loire, Nantes; 1999, p. 33.
2 Maria Lassnig, quoted from Hanne Weskott (ed.), Maria Lassnig. Zeichnungen und Aquarelle 1946–1995, Munich 1995, p. 70.
3 Ibid., p. 18.
4 Maria Lassnig, quoted from Maria Lassnig, exh. cat., Klagenfurt 1985, p. 18.
5 Keine Verteidigung. Manifest zur Ausstellung “Unfigurative Malerei”, Klagenfurt 1951.
6 Maria Lassnig in conversation with Elisabeth Ernst, Gustav Ernst, and Gerda Fassl, in Wespennest 39, 1980.
7 Maria Lassnig (1985) (note 4), p. 35.
8 Ibid., p. 46.
9 Quoted from Weskott (note 2), p. 48.
10 Maria Lassnig, quoted from Maria Lassnig, exh. cat., Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz 1970.
11 Maria Lassnig (1985) (note 4), p. 47.
12 Quoted from Weskott (note 2), p. 80.
13 Maria Lassnig (note 10).
14 Quoted from Maria Lassnig, exh. cat., Venice Biennale, 1980, p. 44.
15 Achim Hochdörfer, “1000 Words: Maria Lassnig,” in Artforum 10, 2008, pp. 404–07. Here quoted from the original German typescript.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 In Maria Lassanig (1980) (note 14), p. 9.
19 Quoted from Hochdörfer (note 15).
20 Artur Rosenauer, “Gedanken zum Altersstil,” in Antonia Hoerschelmann (ed.), Oskar Kokoschka: Exil und neue Heimat 1934–1980,
Ostfildern 2008, p. 16.
21 María de Corral, in Picasso, Guston, Miró, de Kooning: In vollkommener Freiheit . . . Painting for themselves: Late Works, exh. cat.,
Neues Museum Weserburg Bremen 1996, p. 23.
22 Werner Spies, in Picasso. Die Zeit nach Guernica 1937–1973, exh. cat., Nationalgalerie Berlin; Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung
München; Hamburger Kunsthalle; 1992/93.
23 Werner Hofmann, “Oskar Kokoschka,” in Wort in der Zeit 3, 1956, p. 11.
Wolfgang Drechsler | 6

M. L. Revisited
Werner Hofmann
Over fifty years ago I wrote a short article entitled “Die Dinge kommen erst spät in die Welt” (Objects Emerge So Late)
for a leaflet on the Maria Lassnig exhibition at the Galerie nächst St. Stephan in Vienna. I wanted to draw attention to the
premorphic origins of the creative process: “By the time objects come into existence as self-assured, compact, and clearly
defined entities the world has already posited itself as an opposing element; the lines of demarcation have been determined
in relation to fixed points, boundaries have been set, contours have been drawn, a balance has been achieved. [. . .]
This is distinct from the primordial experience of the world before objects existed, with its memory of the very first day the
world was created, at the end of which day was separated from night. By contrast this premorphic experience incorporates
a vast expanse and a flowing, metamorphic interweaving movement.” This is the experience that we find in Maria Lassnig’s
early works.
As early as 1960 I referred to Adalbert Stifter little-known recollections of his youth, which he had
illustrated these processes with great clarity and elegance. These brief reminiscences were published in 1952 by Ludwig
Münz in the Viennese journal Alte und Neue Kunst. Münz evoked Stifter as a counterpart to Hans Sedlmayr, the “apocalyptic
author and commentator,” a former member of the Nazi party who had diagnosed the “loss of the center” in Western
civilization—whereas Stifter now bore witness to the “primordial experience of space, color, light, and form.” Readers
familiar with my theoretical work on Friedrich Schiller’s “dark total idea” will already know the following extract from
Stifter’s autobiography. Maria Lassnig’s early works are possibly the closest approximation to this unique text. For both
Lassnig and Stifter “objects emerged so late,” yet subsequently refused to be ignored.
Stifter wrote that “far back in the empty nothingness is something like bliss and rapture, which surged into my being
with an almost destructive force the like of which I would never experience again. I noted the following features: it was
radiant, it was tumultuous, it was deep down. It must have been very far back, because I had the impression that an immense
ink-black nothingness enveloped the thing. Then there was something else, something gentle and soothing that
went right through me. How would I define it? It was sound. Then I swam in something that seemed to be fanning out.
I swam to and fro, becoming ever more tender inside until it was as if I had drowned; then there was no more.
These three islands lie, fabled and fairytale-like in the veiled seas of the past, like a nation’s most primitive memories.”
Stifter ends with a memory of pain that is transformed into liberation. “Once more I found myself in that abyss, that despondency
I have already spoken of. There were ringing sounds, confusion, my mother was bandaging my bloody, painful
hands, and then there was an image I can still visualize as clearly as if it were perfectly painted on porcelain. I stood in the
garden—the earliest memory of a garden that I possessed—and my mother was there, followed by my other grandmother,
whom I only remembered at that very moment. I felt the relief that always followed when the abyss and the despondency
receded, and I said, ‘Mother, a blade of corn is growing over there.’”
These are the parameters that define Maria Lassnig’s visual creations.
After the 1951 canvas now entitled Informel (then called Abstraktion, an equally confusing title—
wouldn’t Kontraktion have been more appropriate?) was purchased by the Austrian Ministry of Education, I had it transferred
to the Museum of the 20th Century. I wrote about this key picture in the catalogue for the Lassnig exhibition at the
1980 Venice Biennale, pointing out that “this embryonic body already contains the potential for unpredictable divisions
and partitions.” This was indeed the case: it is extremely difficult to envision Selbstporträt mit offener Gehirnschale (Selfportrait
with an Open Skull) of 1958 as a successor to that snarled knot of 1951. Conversely the drawing reveals that the
tangled mess (the contraction) contains a massive disruption, a horizontal fissure that dissects the minimal image into two
cells. A conflict is played out in the dense structure of the picture. At first glance we see a compact, cramped whole; only
later do we discover the horizontal crack—it is an abrupt intrusion rather than an organic division of cells. In this respect
the painting is a prelude to the drawing of the open skull. Without knowing the title of the piece, however, it would be impossible
to decipher the violent opening implied in its lines. The masochistic title also creates a degree of uncertainty, since
the exact nature of the sliced-open capsule is unclear; the inside could actually be the outside, and can you see the wound
at all? And why is the picture labeled a portrait? Whatever the case is, now I discover that there is some fragmentation at
Werner Hofmann | 1

the point where the cells organically divide. I did not originally draw sufficient attention to this shift of emphasis because
my impression of Lassnig’s physicality involved an organic seminal figure fixated on an expanding directness, whose metamorphoses
are painlessly revealed. This was a result of my interest in gestalt psychology and Goethe’s morphology. I took
Goethe’s spiritual visualization of the “primal plant” and projected it onto a universe of logical transformations. As Goethe
wrote, “With this model, and the key to it, one can invent an endless number of plants that will have to be consistent with
each other: those which don’t exist, could exist, and are not just artistic or literary shades and apparitions, but have an inner
truth and necessity” (Goethe to Johann Gottfried von Herder, May 17, 1787).
Necessity—that excludes all kinds of random deviation, whim, or experiment. There was no disordered
form, no concealment or sudden dissonance in Goethe’s entelechy. These are the very factors that now determine
my ideas on form and which have consequently changed my ideas about Lassnig’s body awareness. I see this awareness as
a sensually tangible, plasmatic reservoir from which assorted shapes emerge: tragic and comic forms; demons and poltergeists;
agile homunculi and modified objects; injured and shocked people. Maria Lässnig is both director and leading actor
in this turbulent global theater, both aggressor and victim, wandering back and forth between the experiences that Stifter
chronicled: brilliance—turbulence—abyss—despondency—a growing blade of corn.
These days my gaze is spellbound by acts of violence; where I once saw organic shifts, now I cannot
help but associate Maria Lassnig’s explorations of the body with mutilation. Before she broke away and liberated herself
as a “prophet” (one who inherently incorporates the outline of transhuman physicality) Lassnig worked under the pressure
of threats. The act of painting was a defensive strategy; rather than forcing the body through an infinite loop of metamorphoses,
it placed its existence in precarious situations. Maria subjects her body to visible pressures that comprise a
significant part of her role plays. Crouching in Aufhockung (Perching, 1980), she is a Karyatide (Caryatid, 1974) carrying
an invisible burden. Yet when she bears responsibility there is literally a block-like weight on her back. We are repeatedly
able to feel the need to rest and the sheer exhaustion of the female warrior, the prodigal son among the swine, and the
breathless swimmer. The desperate clutching in the 1973 work Last des Fleisches (Burden of the Flesh) tells the same story.
Her face is marked by sheer horror as a female firefighter in Feuerwehrfrau (1983), as an angel who tries to rescue a pigeon
in Armes Tauberl (Poor Little Pigeon, 1981), and as a mutilated nude who appears to be extricating herself from a cadaver
(Die Trauer, Mourning, 2003).
Yet this tortured creature is possessed of a gallows humor that enables her to survive her imagined hazards. She resorts
to sly hiding places. Country Selbstportrait (1993) consists of two immense blocks⎯a joint of ham and a chunk of cheese.
The split double nature of the picture is reminiscent of the 1951 painting Informel. Yet the solid contours bordering empty
spaces are characteristic of early drawings that seem to indicate the outline of a baby carriage or a static meditation.
Simplifications of this kind should not be confused with abstraction. In later works such as Frühstück mit Ei (Breakfast
with Egg, 1964), or Frühstück mit Ohr (Breakfast with Ear, 1967), they contain the acrobatically active anatomy of androids,
whose evil, cannibalistic humor abounds with violence. The modified implements in Heroische Mistkübel (Heroic Trash
Cans, 1989) are typically bulky, compact, and faceless. Yet there is a variant on the theme; apparently effortlessly the artist
manages to liberate the “armchair” from the function it is supposed to serve, to disavow its aesthetic design, and create a
new species in the storyboard for an animated film⎯these armchairs full of desires and emotions, these sketched creations
that interweave and embrace, copulate and reproduce, stem from the talent for humor that this daughter of Prometheus
possesses.
The pale 1970s nudes were a precursor to the existential distress of the self-portraits. Lassnig poses,
speechless, questioning, and almost ashamed, in imaginary partnerships with a dog, a fish, a butterfly, a tiger, and with
Laocoön’s serpent. This concludes with the threatening monsters that we encounter in the self-portraits, where Maria
squats with arms of wire, as an elephant, or as a savage creature.
All these portrayals of the self, whether embattled or darkly brooding, extend the role play to embrace Stifter’s abyss and
despondency. That may well be a main feature of all modern self-portraits—take Giacometti or Bacon, for example—yet
Lassnig’s introspective storytelling lacks the male ambition to display one’s wounds. She reveals a degree of self-awareness
when she paints herself in a questioning or shocked pose; she is naively astonished as she asks herself, “Is that really me?”
She repeatedly views herself as if for the first time ever, a feature also found in a series of thirty-two drawings of the
country folk of Feistritz in Carinthia whom she portrayed between 1996 and 2003.
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Because this sense of looking for the first time dissipates quickly, a bit of discreet yet risky dramatization is sometimes
required to help things along. Murder of M. L. (1973) is a whodunit worthy of Hitchcock or Highsmith, but adapted to
represent the existence of the artist who tests out his or her suitability as the picture’s subject at all hours. It consists of
four drawings, in the first of which Maria Lassnig faces herself in the role of a reader. As a double self, she sees her reflection
in one of the large mirror shards leaning against the armchair. The self (whose position is identical to that of the viewer)
is waiting to see what will happen to her counterpart in the mirror. The second drawing: Who is knocking at the door?
There is an expression of joyful expectation on her face. The third drawing: The reader has emerged from the mirror, but
we only see the defensive posture of her arms and above them the shadow of a hand wielding a knife. The fourth drawing:
The deed is done and the woman’s face becomes visible once more, her posture seemingly postcoital. The self survives in
two respects—once as an effigy in the shard of mirror, the flawed outline of which is a metaphor for fragmentation, and
secondly shown sketching as the eyewitness of a piece of fiction: M.L. is dead when she is alive and vice versa.
The underlying idea may have been taken from Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Oval Portrait. The painter brings his
model closer to physical destruction with every brushstroke. The death of the model is the price to be paid for the artificial,
sham life that the finished work depicts. Maria Lassnig outmaneuvers this macabre equation by creating a double life in
which she is both drawing and drawn. Just as the fragmentation described above led to the fragile triumph of the prophetess,
the four drawings deal with a double self from which artistic consciousness may select its roles. Maria Lassnig is still
working on this repertoire.
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Too Few Words
Jennifer Higgie
“There are too few words and that is why I draw.” 1
A photograph of Maria Lassnig painting in Vienna in 1983: a woman in her sixties, she lies stretched
out along the floor, wearing a thick sweater and an apron. Her hair is short; she looks determined, sturdy. She holds a paintbrush.
She is painting the figure lying next to her: a naked woman, who appears to be grimacing, turning away from the
artist. They lie there on the floor together like hard-working lovers; one creating the other.
She never paints from photographic sources: to create images from her own experience, from her imagination,
is of paramount importance to Lassnig. She paints not only lying down next to her paintings, but sitting in front
of them, squatting beside them, leaning on them. Apparently, she often paints with closed eyes, feeling her way forward.
She kept her drawings under lock and key until she published a book of them in 1997 (revelation can
be a release). The title of the book is The Pen is the Sister of the Paintbrush. She has written: “[E]very drawing is a triumph
over the world’s restlessness ... [T]ime takes its revenge on any picture that was begun too fast, and it will never be finished.” 2
The paintings can be feverishly bleak: full of acid-yellow grounds, screaming torsos, sightless eyes
gazing desperately skyward; tube-like women without arms and with devilish tails; mouths without faces; juddering muscles;
transparent flesh; anger. Eyes are important, everywhere, but threatened, as if nothing could be worse than a lack of vision.
Canvases are littered with vicious, even grotesque, figures; orifices in pain.
Lassnig’s own face, with its distinctive cheekbones and angular nose, appears again and again in her
paintings. In earlier self-portraits her face is like a rock, a rodent, a virulent abstract line; an animal, an alien, a monster;
something foreign blooming in harsh soil.
There is so much anger here that the humour, when it emerges, can come as a surprise: a fragile character
kicking the arse of a creature with a head like a bull; a nun playing football; a bewildered woman, all angels, with a teddy
bear; a jocular image of amputation or bodies interacting like ill-fitting jigsaws; limb with lips shrieking in a sunny void.
Many of the characters in Lassnig’s pictures seem a mere breath away from hysteria, although some
look simply bewildered, mute, lumpen, as if experiencing the kind of feeling that can only manifest itself wordlessly. There
are myriad tussles here between antagonists, lovers, subjects, the self; occasionally the protagonists stare directly out of the
picture, but often they are so absorbed in their own worlds that they seem oblivious to there exposure. Sometimes, the only
access to their state of mind is through the gesture of their lips. They float, all of them, in colour; details beyond the figure
are banished. “Background,” Lassnig has commented, “creates mood and atmosphere, and I don’t need that.” 3
The body, though, is never one thing; it’s an infinite repository of expression. Thus, in many of her
paintings, Lassnig swerves away from distortion and treats the body as something wholly recognisable, even benign in its
normalcy ⎯ self-portraits of herself with a wine glass, a camera, a child; a naked, plump man kneeling on the floor, examining
an egg; a woman sitting on a man’s lap, gazing at him adoringly, while he looks equally adoringly at his own face in a mirror.
The struggle here is between two worlds: the surface (of the skin, of the painting, of paint), and the
inner world (of the painter, of the person looking at the painting). The artist is at once herself, the body she inhabits, and the
subject of her own creativity.
Jennifer Higgie | 1

There is no order, no overriding logic to these pictures, because deep down, few people are truly orderly.
Despite being law-abiding, an anarchy of desire and illogic can co-exist within each person and yet manifest itself in a
profound conformity. This duality is something that Lassnig seems to recognise—and knows how to express—intimately.
She has said: “When I’m painting, almost everything is allowed. Embarrassment is a challenge; I want
to paint things that are uncomfortable.” 4
There is something perverse about writing about the pictures of an artist who feels so keenly the inability
of the written or spoken word to express—not just the big feelings that render most people speechless, but the small
complications we negotiate hundreds of times a day. We all live inside bodies that we can never describe accurately (why do
we consider ourselves unique?). The literal or metaphorical meaningsof skin remain elusive. Precise meanings of paintings
remain obscure because paintings are not formulas and do not contain precise meanings; it is not their job to do so. Yet still,
a formal question hums beneath these virulent surfaces: how is it possible to communicate complexity in a static, twodimensional
medium?
Lassnig makes paintings and drawings that register what it means for her, and by association other
people, to be alive. The body, her pictures reiterate, is in a constant state of flux. What does it mean, they ask, to exist inside
such permanent change? Her images take sensual pleasure in the physical world, while registering with sorrow and empathy
the complications of living and communicating with others and with ourselves. Her paintings live in the eternal present;
even in old age, Lassnig is never nostalgic or complacent in her pictures. She continues to ask questions: of how to continue
to live in a body in which you have lived all your life and which will eventually kill you; of how possible it is to understand
the elusive inner worlds of the people with whom you choose to co-exist. Our bodies are our homes and the only way we can
leave them is if we die. What, she seems to be asking is, could be more complicated than that?
Any painting of a body is, of course, also a portrait of a mind. The only way to separate the mind from
the body visually would be to paint a corpse.
Lassnig describes her approach to making pictures as “bodily consciousness,” “body awareness” or
“body sensation.” “But what do we mean by a bodily sensation?” she has written: “And how much vivisection does an art
tolerate, as much as love?” 5 All she brings to the beginning of her paintings is her belief that the only real things she knows
are the feelings unfolding within the shell that is her body; that to describe in lines and forms the sensation of being in space
is a difficult thing to do, but somehow important; as if by visually naming something, it will become more bearable. However,
when she is making a painting she has said that she likes, simply, to let things happen. She has said:
“[T] he fewer intentions I bring to a picture, the better it usually turns out ... If I want to paint something
very specific, then that is an intention. But I approach my work without intentions. The only intention is that I sense
the way I am standing in front of the canvas at that particular moment. And then I go into detail. And, of course, I have to
give form to that—because a feeling has no form; it is a dissemination.” 6
I imagine that when she begins a picture she is as tentative as someone striking up a conversation with
a stranger, hoping that one observation will lead to another; that one word, one brushstroke, might trigger an association
with another; might lead to a certain intimacy.
In her paintings, limbs emerge from the turmoil, as if she has remembered them only in fragments, in
a hierarchy of importance or significance—a mouth here, a snout-like nose or a torso there, a solid jaw, an arm. (People, it
is true, so often disappear and leave pieces of themselves behind.) Her pictures are littered with flesh, but their nakedness is
unembarrassed—perhaps simply another form of camouflage. Bodies are pugnacious with their own logic and won’t, like
most pugilists, stop at their limits. These are muscular pictures; tough, unrelenting, unforgiving.
Jennifer Higgie | 2

A recent self-portrait: she is naked, her ageing body scrutinised and represented without shame. The
light is harsh. She is holding one gun to her head and pointing another directly at the viewer. Her eyes, like blue bullet holes.
The misery here is active, never one-dimensional; it howls in varying registers. Even when the colours
are bright, the atmosphere is dark but shot through with slivers of near-electric light; one person, even a solitary one, always
seems to be moving dangerously close towards someone else. Lassnig translates this movement of meaning into colours and
shapes that swerve between a near-hysterical, abstract rawness and a virtuoso control over the figure. The colours refuse to
be quiet: cerulean blues rail at the bitter yellows while the greens brood in the background and the fragile greys and pinks
won’t leave skin alone. The separation between the sexes is stark: men are often flabby, knuckle-headed brutes, inhabiting
bodies forged from the kind of meat that barely conceals its tough bones. Women often appear to be dissolving into themselves
or someone else, yet they are never fragile: emotional amputees with tough sinews, they will not be put down. Brides
reappear again and again, gloomy with the implication that there might not be much to celebrate at a wedding, their veils
simply another element to separate them from the world they so anxiously inhabit. Occasionally bodies are distorted to a
degree of utter strangeness, like aliens remotely related to humans, or mute players in a surreal costume play without a script.
Yet humour is always lurking in the wings, ready to leap in at unexpected moments—in slap-stick tussles, in the absurd
connections between organisms, in the cartoon colours and the flash of a cartoon head. They are the noisiest silent paintings
around. It is astonishing that we cannot hear them scream.
Maria Lassnig once said: “I’m a totally normal human being. Just very, very sensitive. So maybe I’m not
so normal. But I am a rational being.” 7
Notes:
1 Maria Lassnig, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien/Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes and Fonds Régional d’Art
Contemporain des Pays de la Loire. Exh. Cat. 1999, p 65.
2 Maria Lassnig, “About my drawings,” in ibid., p 174.
3 “Inside Out,” an interview with Maria Lassnig by Jörg Heiser, frieze magazin, 103 (November, 2006), p 120.
4 Ibid., p 123
5 Maria Lassnig, “About transforming bodily sensations onto a surface,” in Maria Lassnig, op. cit., p 94.
6 Heiser, op. cit., p 120.
7 Ibid., p 124.
This text was first published in Maria Lassnig, ed. by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julia Peyton-Jones, Serpentine Gallery London,
exhibition catalogue, London 2008
Jennifer Higgie | 3

Ave Maria
Robert Storr
“Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented.” 1 That’s Willem de Kooning talking, and nobody knew the truth of
this statement better than he. Indeed, nobody has rendered the body in its variously firm, flaccid or oozingly fluid aspects
with greater accuracy, pitilessness or relish than this latter-day Dutch master. De Kooning’s historical point of reference was
Jan van Eyck, for in van Eyck the sculptural qualities of traditional panel painting with its burnished but nevertheless dry
tempera surfaces—call them the Medieval bones of Renaissance art—acquire a skin, and beneath that skin is the palpable
pressure of muscle and fat. In short, van Eyck gave the “tactile values” that art critic Bernard Berenson recog-nised in early
Italian art a corporeal substance that they had never before possessed.
The much-predicted death of painting that haunted twentieth-century art, and now haunts that of the
twenty-first—or at any rate, the death of oil painting—presumes that we will abruptly exhaust our fascination with the stuff
of which we ourselves are made. But ever since we have known how to create such richly carnal mirrors of our own all-toohuman
fleshiness, the odds against this actually happening have been very long, especially when our innate narcissism is
factored in. Yet, one could easily argue that the modernist quest for pure from and its frequently corresponding hostility to
painterly painting, if not painting of all kinds, reflects currents that in most of us alternate with that narcissism: namely, vanity
(inordinate self-love) and squeamishness (inordinate self-loathing).
As to the latter, the present vogue for the informe and its perversely hieratic theorist, Georges Bataille,
can correspondingly be understood as an intellectual sublimation of some of the more extreme manifestations of such
excessive self-loathing, given that the chief advocates of this academically sanitised school of thought count among those
least sympathetic to the medium. Funny how such brave explorers of the unloveliest regions of the individual and collective
subconscious love to play with words but recoil from playing with themselves, or with others who lend themselves to
shameless fondling either directly or with an unctuous brush.
Jackson Pollock, Wols, and other notables notwithstanding, the problem for painterly painting in
the post-war era was not definitive regression into formlessness (whether informe or merely informel) any more than it was
a definitive subordination to competing non-objective modes, hard-edged and soft. After all, the looping line of classic
Pollocks of 1950 coalesced into the nearly tangible shapes of the canvases that immediately followed them, just as Wols’s
squiggles of the same time quickened with organic life and de Kooning himself abandoned the abstraction of Excavation,
1950 for Woman I, 1950-52, only to double back to abstractions with breasts and buttocks and phantom limbs. And even
when painters left painting behind to access a greater performative “reality”—as did Gutai artists such as Kazuo Shiraga,
Atsuko Tanaka, Saburo Murakami, or the members of Viennese Actionism, Hermann Nitsch, Günther Brus, Rudolf
Schwarzkogler and Otto Mühl—painting continued unabated and gradually incorporated the lessons of these departures
whether they were permanent or just temporary as was ultimately the case in many instances.
No, the problem for painterly painting has never been to liquidate, expunge or obliterate the implicit
physicality of paint once and for all. Instead, it has been to body it forth convincingly, though not always literally, and in
its full metamorphic flux. That in any event has been Maria Lassnig’s preoccupation for over half a century. It may seem
impolite tacitly to give away Lassnig’s age in the same breath as one introduces her, since it would be natural to assume,
based on the work itself, that she is much younger than her nearly 90 years. But surprise and the need to correct assumptions
about where it comes from is one of the key satisfactions of her art. In this, she shares something with other women of her
generation whose careers were either late to begin in earnest or late to be reckoned with—or both. To all intents and purposes,
hers started at just the historical turning referred to before—the cusp of the 1950s—when Pollock and de Kooning
did what advanced critical opinion told them they shouldn’t do, and that was to reinsert the figure into nominally abstract
compositions. As such, her initial development is typical of many younger artists contending with the primary reception,
personal assimilation and ultimate transformation of the medium’s prevailing paradigms. As evidenced in Lassnig’s paint-
Robert Storr | 1

ings and drawings, they included asides to Wols—who quit the scene in 1951 at just that pivotal moment—as well as traces
of calligraphic gesturalism and quasi-geometric, quasi-biomorphic versions of non-objective abstraction, all executed with
understanding and conviction, but derivative and generally modest nevertheless.
In sum, Lassnig belonged to the legion of talented young people who flocked to the French capital
from around the world in the aftermath of World War II, searching for a link to the School of Paris’s fertile inter-bellum
period of 1918–39 and for a place in its chastened new avant-gardes even as the school of New York’s effects were first
being felt and Europe’s horizons were being broadened overall. Recognition of the fact would eventually bring Lassnig
to Manhattan in the late 1960s. There, in the waning of New York’s halcyon days, she would land in another city that was
experiencing—as Vienna had before it—the first inklings of the partial eclipse of a former cultural dominance, but also
the salutary aesthetic pluralism that attends the passing of any hegemony. One might go so far as to say that this tendency
confirms Lassnig’s characteristic vantage point on history as a Viennese born in 1919 just after the end of World War I.
Lateness, it would seem, comes naturally to her. This is not in the form of archetypical post-imperial melancholy and
lassitude fin-de-siecle style, but rather as a instinctive knack for finding the vital signs and tipping into unused energy in
situations where just about everything appears to be, or is, agonisingly out of joint.
The first clear indications of this gift emerge around 1961–62, about a decade after Lassnig’s apprenticeship
to Parisian informel and its Austrian spin-offs. This, of course, was also the period in which Actionism morphed
out of the related experiments in the gestural painting of Nitsch, Brus, Mühl and Schwarzkogler. In that connection, it is
worth stressing that like Surrealism—another Freud-influenced movement devoted to radical de-sublimation—Actionism
offered scant room and still less autonomy to women participants. Knowing her as we do from her work—and getting
to know Lassnig in all guises is for the artist as well as the viewer what that work is basically about, though her existential
anti-essentialism is explicit in the almost Hindu multiplicity of her aspects—one can hardly imagine her submitting to the
blasphemous or scatological ministrations of Nitsch or Mühl or to the martyr-like mortification of the flesh of Brus or
Schwarzkogler. Obviously, neither prudishness nor any other sort of modesty, including the painterly variety she abandoned
along with the small format in the 1950s, have little to do with her abstinence in this regard. Nor are pain and its
dramatisation missing from her repertoire. On that score, one can infer from her imagery and her testimony that the worst
episodes of Lassnig’s psychic distress have been roughly the equivalent of Brus’s and Schwarzkogler’s, and theirs were plainly
excruciating. What makes the difference—and the difference is at least partly gender-linked—is humour. That quality is
largely absent in the work of the men who composed the Actionist phalanx, or at least it is suppressed, and when present
it is generally willed and aggressive rather than genuinely playful. Hardly ever is it self-directed, as is commonly the case in
Lassnig’s work.
Strikingly, in one of the earliest of her self-portraits, done in 1944—perhaps the darkest year of the
Reich and of the crushing chain of disasters it set in motion—one can detect an animation in her otherwise wary expression,
a latent facial mobility underlying the visible immobility that could as easily turn to a twinkle or bittersweet up-turn
of the mouth as to a harrowed look more in keeping with the context. The blank visage Lassnig wears in the faceted, monolithic
heads she carved out of impasto pigment in the mid-1950s—we can be sure that at least some of them are her from
the tell-tale wide cheek-bones—also betray a kind of plastic wit, as if she were caricaturing the “archaic” and the “primitive”,
as it was then plentifully manifested in painting and sculpture from that of the genre’s grand old master Constantin Brancusi,
to the work of as yet less established but highly regarded newcomers such as Jean Dubuffet and Lassnig’s countryman
Fritz Wotruba. By the 1960s, that broad, Sphinx-like face took on a frankly cartoon demeanour, and in the absurdly,
albeit disconcertingly, funny Square Body Sensation, 1960, she wraps cool geometric abstraction in the flayed skin of biomorphism,
conflates the reclining nude with the portrait head (much as Philip Guston did at the end of the decade) and
with a stunning, at long last fully developed grasp of her own abilities and prerogatives, laid claim to painting in the cause
of fanciful, self- referential invention at its most grotesque.
This is not the occasion to delve into formal, etymological, historical and cultural origins of that term,
or to rehearse the arguments that give it contemporary currency; having done that elsewhere at some length I will spare
the reader a repetition. Still, in every sense that matters, “grotesque” is the mot juste when it comes to classifying Lassnig’s
wayward way with shapes and her astonishingly uninhibited and associatively as well as dissociatively provocative distortion
Robert Storr | 2

of the natural. Well worth underscoring in that context, and at a time when figurative art is “back” in a fairly wide array of
narrative, approximately “realist” incarnations spanning the perennial grit and gristle of Lucian Freud and the meat-slabpictures
of Jenny Saville (first-person clinical counterparts to de Kooning’s Rubensian caprices that judo-flip the masculine
gaze while pushing the burden of feminine amplitude up against the limits of endurance for both the subject and the
public) to the similarly robust, marginally less conflicted but altogether stranger images of Lisa Yuskavage, is the exceptional
dimension of one type of figuration in which Lassnig has specialised: the science-fiction of body art.
The first overt example in Lassnig’s work dates to 1963; it is a seemingly anomalous picture, simply
and declaratively titled Science Fiction Painting. In it, two figures, one viewed from overhead and the other from the side,
confront each other like robots or bionic monsters. Although their limbs and torsos bulge, they are graphic and, uncharacteristically
for the artist, devoid of flesh, or at least of fleshy paint handling. Glancing at them one is reminded of the
extravagant “aliens” that populated movies and pulp magazines in the post-Hiroshima era. One also recalls the legacy of
Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp’s sexual mechanics, while looking ahead to the baroque sci-fi-meets-Eros sculpture
of Bruno Gironcoli, Lassnig’s junior and Wotruba’s successor as the lead sculptor at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. Meanwhile,
like Eva Hesse, who at the end of the 1960s would invent an iconography that resembles that of her Austrian elder in
certain respects, Lassnig was not making “bachelor machines” in the manner of her Dada forefather, but projecting feminine
anxieties on to forms suggestive of aggression and desire at their most involuntary. In these automatons, instinct becomes
function, reflex response a programmed set of actions.
In the due course, Lassnig’s pictorial schemata bulked out, often acquiring an explicitly animalistic
aura such as a rodent face or canine muzzle, but the skeleton of those machine-men and women can clearly be discerned
under the layers of tissue she added. And, at various times since, it has exploded through the skin of her figures like the
über-alien created for the eponymous film by the Swiss horror meister HR Giger, though Lassnig’s unique ability to mix
comedy, vulnerability and terror owes nothing to Giger’s uniformly gross creatures nor to the slickness of his illustrative
style. In addition to the parallels with Hesse’s early drawings, far more revealing comparisons can be made to the monstrous
body-surrogates of Louise Bourgeois and Dorothea Tanning, in particular the soft, biomorphic sculptures to which each has
devoted herself—Bourgeois in the 1940s and again in the 1990s, and Tanning in the 1970s. One might also cast an eye in the
direction of Alice Neel, whose often garish—some would say Expressionist—palette, and startlingly rapid, direct and discursive
manner of similarities to Lassnig’s, not least the electric sparks that her hand seems to discharge as it bolts or skips or
scurries across the surface of the canvas.
Counterbalancing this anti-natural strain in Lassnig’s work, with both its classically grotesque and
science-fiction variants, is a recurrent, superficially forthright but still eccentric, emotionally loaded and generally autographical
naturalism. The most concentrated and developed phase of this side of her work coincided with her New York
sojourn, starting in 1969 and lasting on and off until 1979, when she returned home to take up a professorship in painting
at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, the first woman in Austria to have been offered one. The decade of the 1970s also
roughly coincided with realism’s resurgence in New York as a part of the panoply of aesthetic tendencies that flourished
during that pluralist interval. Hybrid pictures such as Self-portrait as an Astronaut and Whitsun Self-portrait, both 1969,
show Lassnig working away from the burlesque Sado-masochistic vocabulary of upholstered blocks and masses that she
used to build her monstrous bodies, towards comparatively prosaic but effortless and compelling descriptions of hands and
arms and other details that anchor these curious figures in the everyday world. Her still lifes of the same period follow a
similar trajectory. Breakfast with Ear, 1967, is a fantasia in which electric blenders, juicers and other household appliances,
outlined in the most rudimentary but still ominous manner, loom over a plate on which sits a fork and a detached ear that
has by contrast, been fully modelled—premonitory shades of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Compare this with Still Live, 1971,
where the traditional table set-up includes two unexpected but hardly uncanny elements. The first is an almost empty bottle
of vodka or gin, and the second two Saran-wrapped packages of fruit, which in their cultural and temporal specificity have
USA consumerism written all-over them but without blatantly Pop styling, while at the same time nodding to the treatment
that the American realist Janet Fish was then giving the same mundane packaging of grocery items.
In an image from a year later, Saran wrap or its equivalent carries entirely different meanings. Selfportrait
Encased in Plastic, 1972, revisits Lassnig’s long-standing fascination with her own countenance. The observation-
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ased understatement of her painterly realist mode makes the mask of plastic she wears all the more anomalous and all the
more poignant as a device for focusing like a pliable lens on her features, for playing with the notion of preservation when
signs of aging are readily visible in her face and its forlorn expression, for implying hermetic containment or isolation,
and for evoking the suffocation of suicides who cover there heads in plastic bags, without going all the way and staging the
desperate act herself. There are many other self-portraits of the 1970s in which similarly banal but disturbing attributes are
combined with unblinking depictions of her middle-aged nudity or partial nudity, and one that shows her fully clothed
twice. In the background she is standing inside the frame of a painting within the painting and her face is partially obscured
by a movie camera whose multiple lenses/eyes are trained on the viewer. In the foreground in front of that painting she
sits slumped forward with her eyes closed and her chin resting on her hand, but the face she exposes is only one of many
stacked on top of each other, thus emphasising that all of her many faces are masks, and that behind each is hidden another.
Although this work belongs to her New York period, it reminds us that she shares this penchant for making faces with her
fellow Viennese Arnulf Rainer, whose guiding spirit has been the German sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, and that
while this double self-portrait is a comparatively sober example, Lassnig’s personifications of her many moods can be as
wild as Rainer and Messerschmidt combined.
After the 1970s, Lassnig launched into a long, strenuously pyrotechnic crescendo of symbolic and
allegorical pictures in which such naturalism is for the most part set aside and imagery is distended, warped and shredded
by bold, shape-shifting strokes of paint alternating with painted or unpainted voids. What recognisable body parts
there are, are just that: parts, fragments—a mouth, a snout, clumps of liver-coloured paint that resemble raw knuckles or
viscera. (Remember, Lassnig hails from the land in which Nitsch mounted the first performances of his OMT, or Orgies and
Mysteries Theatre, with its gruesome parodies of blood sacrifice and abundant displays of offal.) Altogether inexplicable but
unnervingly believable fusions and deformations of organic and geometric abstraction take Square Body Sensation, 1960, to
extremes that would have been impossible to anticipate, and result in pulsing, swelling thought balloons whose contents are
the various distillates and tinctures of hallucinatory madness.
Against this background, it is tempting to ascribe the unrestrained weirdness of Lassnig’s work of the
1980s and 1990s to some kind of hysteria, or protracted fugue state, and there are enough indications of distress in her selfrepresentations
to lend support to such a reading. However, accepting such an interpretation turns Lassnig’s imaginative
leaps into pathological symptoms—a tried and true way to contain and marginalise the achievement of women artists of a
certain emotional intensity given that in Freud’s view hysteria was a peculiarly and prejudicially female complaint—while
ignoring Lassnig’s competitive drive and the test provided for it by Neo-Expressionism of that period. No matter how highly
strung she is, Lassnig is first and foremost a painter, and her intuitions are not just innately histrionic, inner-directed, selfexamining;
they are outer-directed and, in the best but most unrelenting artistic sense, self-interested and self-advocating.
As if to squelch such undercutting responses to her work, Lassnig has lately come back to her naturalist
manner of the 1970s, but used her own likeness sparingly so far as frequency is concerned, though she has increasingly
relied on younger models. Plastic makes its come back as well, insulating two lovers from each other like giant condoms—
Couple, 2005 or screening the painter herself from fully view—The Power of Fate, 2006, and Illegitimate Bride, 2007. As
before, humour leavens angst in Self-portrait with cooking Pot, 1995. And when it comes to the bulkiest and seemingly most
brutal of personae, as in The World Destroyer, 2003, or Bugbear, 2003, humour is also a leveller. Even the obscenely Don Juan
D’Austria, 2003—which has the same male protagonist as the two previous pictures—is laughable, that of course being the
point, for rarely has masculinity cut a less romantic but more life-like profile. And if such a man is driving Lassnig to the
brink, her pistol-wielding self-portrait You or Me (Du oder Ich), 2005, not only matches his anything-but-Calvin-Klein physique
with her anything-but-Kate-Moss hanging breasts, protruding belly and pubic baldness, but leaves us guessing as to
whether Lassnig will accept her victimisation or, seconding Nancy Spero’s feminist recasting of Oskar Kokoschka’s famous
dictum, act on her compatriot’s implicit command that “Murder, [is] the Hope of Women”. Or does the “you” of the title
refer to individual members of the public who watch her suffer, in which circumstance the gun pointed outward signals that
voyeurism is dangerous? Or, by linguistic displacement, does it refer to the artist caught regarding one of her later egos and
so to the perils of narcissism?
More matter of fact is Lassnig’s Adam and Eve suite of 2005, made up of some five canvases in all. Again, the initial impression
is of conventional studio nudes, which, at the most basic level, they are. But for those as unembarrassed by those con-
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ventions as they are by the enjoyment of commonplace adult nakedness, these paintings exude a vitality that is irresistible,
not for voyeuristic reasons, but because Lassnig is able to transmit the sensuality of her own delight in the visual so frankly
and so powerfully. Meanwhile, eyes attuned to modern art from German-speaking countries will savour the added pleasure
of the correlations between these paintings and Max Beckmann’s Adam and Eve, 1917—especially in the off-key flesh tones
—and the work of Lovis Corinth. These correlations are unmistakable but indirect, open-ended and deeply satisfying, in
part because Lassnig eschews overt historicism in favour of the freshness of her gaze.
Lassnig knows tradition and belongs to tradition, but reserves the right to play havoc with it; she
exercises that right regularly but without warning, as if to mess up any pattern that might be imposed on her production
from outside. And so it is that each turn about in her production no sooner begins than it turns or twists again, sharply inward
or outward in the midst of its initial arc, resulting in a widely gyrating, periodically snarled spiral like a spring that has
been contorted yet somehow retains, indeed increases, its basic tensile strength. And so it is that intermingled with Lassnig’s
recent figure studies are ever more freakishly somatic conjuring tricks, ranging from cartoon variations on her naturalist
paintings such as Dream Couple, 2004, to religious themes (Abraham Sacrifices His Son, 2007), to self-satire (The Artist,
2006) to self portraiture in extremis (Self-portrait with Bubble, 2007), to oxymoronic pictorial riddles (Tenderness, 2004), to
current events as archetype (Children as Warriors, 2006). The scope of her referents and allusions is amazing when one lays
them all out, but the nature of the tensions and antagonisms with which Lassnig deals rarely involve more than two people
and often just one, who is in conflict with himself or herself. Society, insofar as it is accounted for in her world, is a multiplication
of ones and twos, an amalgam of individual longing and misery and foolishness that flows unstoppably from her
brush but is accented jarringly here and there by spasmodic flicks of the wrist.
Whose longing, whose misery, whose foolishness, and whose struggle with the awkward choreography
of being and whose obsession with fright masks of identity are these? In the first instance, they are Lassnig’s, of course. In
playing her game of hide-and-seek she offers her pictures as a series of clues, and the rules of that game as she has written
them mean that, Medusa-like, the images threaten to overwhelm the psyche of those who do not avert their gaze. But rather
than turning the unwary viewer to stone, Lassnig’s Gorgon stare agitates the mind until it vibrates in synch with her febrile
imagination. The effect is at once invigorating and exhausting, a demonstration of painterly virtuosity and a mise-en-abime
of the self that sucks in everyone whose eye is caught in her mirror. And in so far as Lassnig successfully co-opts the viewer
by using her protean identity as bait, it is a game, not of hide-and-seek, but of tag.
Notes:
1 Willem de Kooning, “The Renaissance and Order,” trans | formation: arts, communication, environment, 2 (1951), p. 85 ff.
This text was first published in Maria Lassnig, ed. by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julia Peyton-Jones, Serpentine Gallery London,
exhibition catalogue, London 2008
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