December 16, 2021 61Body Awareness
James QuandtMaria Lassnig:
The Paris Years, 1960 – 68
an exhibition at the Petzel Gallery,
New York City, November 4–
December 17, 2021.
Catalog of the exhibition with
an essay by Lauren O’Neill- Butler.
Petzel, 79 pp., $35.00Maria Lassnig: Film Works
edited by Eszter Kondor,
Michael Loebenstein, Peter Pakesch,
and Hans Werner Poschauko.
FilmmuseumSynema Publikationen,
189 pp., $35.00 (paper)Many female artists—most recently
Carmen Herrera, Faith Ringgold, and
Lorraine O’Grady—have had to wait
a lifetime to be accorded the recogni-
tion of a major museum retrospective.
The Austrian painter and filmmaker
Maria Lassnig abided many decades of
curatorial slights and oversights before
being granted one at the Serpentine
Gallery in London in 2008, six years
before her death at the age of ninety-
four. Astonished by the revelation of
Lassnig’s extreme paintings, with their
sometimes bilious palettes and glee-
ful emphasis on aged, corpulent, and
deliquescing flesh, The Guardian’s re-
viewer Laura Cumming proclaimed,
“Maria Lassnig is the discovery of the
year—of the century.”
Hans Ulrich Obrist, the curator of
the retrospective, later revealed thatMaria had a lot of doubts about
doing an exhibition at the Serpen-
tine in London. She didn’t think
it would be a success.... A week
before the opening, she wanted
to cancel because she thought the
ceilings were too low.But she was thrilled when British crit-
ics compared her portraits to those of
Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, two
of the artists she admired most. Indeed,
the rotund male nudes who repeat-
edly appear in Lassnig’s work—such
as The World Destroyer, a bemused
colossus who clutches what appears
to be a deflated globe between his
beefy hands—seem like comical con-
freres of the obese performance artist
Leigh Bowery, who appears in many of
Freud’s paintings. Even when whimsi-
cal, Lassnig’s depictions of the human
body tend to be unsparing—“drastic,”
to use her word—not least in her many
ruthless self- portraits. Du oder Ich
(You or Me) depicts her as a menacing
nude, her senescent body haloed with
her trademark viridian, her legs bra-
zenly splayed to emphasize her hairless
pudendum as she points two guns, one
at her audience, the other at her temple.
Who will perish first, the onlooker or
the artist?
B o r n i n 1 9 1 9 i n t h e s o u t h e r n A u s t r i a n
state of Carinthia, Lassnig developed
both an early confidence in her artistic
ability and a sense of self- doubt. Her
autobiographical film Maria Lassnig
Kantate (The Ballad of Maria Lassnig,
1992) portrays her childhood home as
a parental battlefield where she was
constantly ducking to avoid a barrage
of domestic projectiles. In her prodi-
gious biography of the artist, Natalie
Lettner offers a psychological readingof Lassnig’s often paralyzing combi-
nation of immense pride—“I painted
far better than any man,” she boasts,
her hubris laced with self- mockery, in
Kantate—and debilitating insecurity.
Lettner observes that “even in old age,
Lassnig still attributed her low self-
esteem to growing up in the country-
side: ‘zero self- confidence!’”^1
Lettner further implies that Lassnig’s
anxiety emerged from her feelings of
illegitimacy, as the child of a father
who claimed noble lineage and refused
to marry her nonaristocratic mother,
Mathilde. He rejected his newborn
daughter because he desired a male
heir, but he deigned to inspect her and
declared in dismay at her homeliness,
“She’ll improve”—a tale her mother
repeated to her many times. After
abandoning Maria for some years to be
raised by a harried and unloving grand-
mother, Mathilde married a much
older baker named Lassnig. Though
she was so unhappy in marriage that
she attempted suicide, she pressed her
daughter to wed and have children,
which Maria instinctively knew would
mean capitulation to domesticity and
the end of her artistic career. In Kan-
tate, she celebrates her intransigent
resistance to the many marriage pro-
posals that came her way, and Lettner
writes that she turned the fine linens
and sheets that her mother had gath-
ered for her dowry into materials for
her paintings.
Lassnig recorded her guilt over not
fulfilling Mathilde’s wishes and her
grief over her premature death from
cancer in several works, most movingly
in the painting Mother and Daughter.
The periphery of the canvas is crowded
with witnesses who gaze impassivelydown upon the distraught artist as
she nestles on a white sheet next to
her dead mother, whose stomach and
hand have sprouted lush greenery, as if
to make literal the saying from Isaiah,
“All flesh is grass.”“I g r ew u p w i t h o u t l a n g u a g e ,” L a s s n i g
once claimed. A taciturn, pious child
who valued images over words, she ex-
celled at a convent school run by Ur-
suline nuns despite being tormented
by the other students. Lettner recounts
that the sole exception to her perfect
grades was “a C in Diligence because
she was too shy to speak.” She did not
remain mute for long. The acute, anti-
sentimental nature Lassnig developed
in this often cruel setting later found
expression in her profuse notebooks,
which teem with mini- manifestoes,
acid observations, and witty nota-
tions—“I want a man I can switch on
and off like a TV.” And the bulletins
she wrote for Viennese newspapers
from Paris and New York about gal-
lery shows and aesthetic trends during
the 1960s and 1970s reveal a crisp
proficiency.
However, Lassnig remained un-
usually vague and evasive about her
years at the Academy of Fine Arts
in Vienna, to which she was admit-
ted in 1940 after fleeing a brief stint
as a country schoolteacher. She did
not know enough, she claimed, to be
frustrated by the stringent antimod-
ernism of its faculty, which by then
had been purged of all Jewish and
“Jewish- miscegenated” professors; she
remained largely unaware of anything
other than classic realist and Old Mas-
ter painting. Lassnig seemed to flourish
in the conservative atmosphere of the
academy, where the artistic ideals were
Rembrandt and Dürer, “probably,” she
surmised, “because my drawings had
a rustic farm quality to them—and ontop of that I wore a Dirndl dress and
had braids.” She described her atti-
tude as “childlike” during this period,
which suggests a naive obliviousness
about the war and the academy’s col-
lusion with the Nazi regime. Her pro-
fessor Wilhelm Dachauer, for example,
who produced celebrations of Aryan
peasantry, went on to paint, Lettner
notes, “a monumental full- length por-
trait of Hitler for the ceremonial room
of Vienna’s City Hall.” Her account of
this period of Lassnig’s career suggests
that she could not have been entirely
unaware of the academy’s politics and
was granted scholarships that would
have gone only to politically acquies-
cent students.
“Over the years, I have been involved
with a lot of isms,” Lassnig professed at
the beginning of an essay in Artforum
on the occasion of her Serpentine ret-
rospective. Those “isms” included the
“degenerate” artistic movements that
the faculty at the academy had assid-
uously concealed from its students,
especially Surrealism, Expressionism,
Automatism, Cubism, and, to a lesser
degree, Impressionism. Repudiating
the precepts of her professors once the
war ended, Lassnig took up some of
those hitherto forbidden styles, often
combining elements from each, and
her palette brightened from what she
called “brown sauce,” the dun mono-
chrome decreed by the academy, even-
tually transforming into an antirealist
riot of minty greens, fleshy pinks, and
citric yellows, inspired by the intense
colors used by artists in her home prov-
ince of Carinthia.
Though Lassnig is credited with
helping to introduce the gestural ab-
straction of art informel and Tachisme
into postwar Austrian art, she inherited
those movements from others. Her in-
creasing emphasis on dissolving the di-
vision between mind and body resulted
in her most important contributionMaria Lassnig: Krankenhaus (Hospital), 1965Maria Lassnig Foundation(^1) Maria Lassnig: Die Biographie (Vi-
enna: Brandstätter, 2017); an English
translation will be published by Petzel
in 2022.
Quandt 61 62 .indd 61 11 / 18 / 21 11 : 43 AM