62 The New York Reviewto art, which she called “body aware-
ness painting.” In the Artforum essay
she describes this approach:Figuration comes about almost
automatically, because in my art I
start first and foremost with myself.
I do not aim for the “big emotions”
when I’m working, but concentrate
on small feelings: sensations in the
skin or in the nerves, all of which
one feels. I became interested in
all this early on and tried to fix
these sensations in straightforward
brushstrokes, because in the body
they are changing continuously.As Lettner details, Lassnig’s intense
apprehension of physicality no doubt
originated in her hypersensitivity, to
sound and odor especially, but also to
any kind of pain or suffering, including
that of animals; she wrote in 1944, “I
feel like a fragile apothecary’s scale
being used to weigh sacks of flour.”
Attempting to translate corporeal
sensations and ephemeral perceptions
onto the canvas—what she called
“paining the painting into form”—
Lassnig subjected the representation of
her body to a series of mutations, exci-
sions, and attenuations. A self- portrait
might situate her brain outside her cra-
nium, perched at the back of her head
like a misplaced beret; shear off her
hair entirely, leaving an exposed, slab-
like forehead atop a squarish, blankly
staring face; place her head next to an
abstract one whose central feature is
a vulva; or taper an arm into a flimsy
ribbon of tissue where the hand should
be. Lassnig systematized colors so that
they matched various emotions or parts
of the body: pain had its own hue, as
did thought.“Maria Lassnig: The Paris Years,
1960 –68,” at the Petzel Gallery, traces
the development of her art during her
crucial Paris sojourn, beginning with
a series of informel abstractions. Their
scribbles carry hints of the violets and
lilacs that later predominated in many
of the paintings of Joan Mitchell,
whom Lassnig befriended in Paris and
who shared her derision at the term
“lady painter.”^2 These are followed by
a series of exquisite Strichbilder (line
paintings), whose airy skeins of pig-
ment eerily anticipate the late works of
Willem de Kooning.
As figuration returned to Lassnig’s
canvases around 1962, in such waggish
works as The Grumpy Hero, in which
a red- faced warrior dominates center
stage only to implode in a fit of mock
fury, and she became fascinated by sci-
ence fiction, her body awareness paint-
ings transformed into a strange bestiary
of homunculi and chimerae. Humans
merge with animals, machines, or mon-
sters, as in Dressur (Dressage, 1965), in
which a half- canine, half- sphinx crea-
ture with a human face crawls across a
field of green while another torso- less
anthropoid, consisting only of a face
(Lassnig’s?) and jumbo, outthrust legs
rides its back end, and a male figure
lurks ominously in the upper- left cor-
ner. A dog is also discernible at the edgeof the frame, one of many in Lassnig’s
work, like the black puppy that lolls on
a recumbent nude in her early film Iris
or the mutts that crowd her recently
discovered Dog Film from the mid-
1970s. The exhibition culminates with
two of Lassnig’s strongest works of the
period: Hospital (1965), the canvas that
Laura Cumming considered the mas-
terpiece of the Serpentine retrospec-
tive and that reveals an affinity with the
crowd scenes of the Belgian symbolist
James Ensor (see illustration on page
61); and Breakfast with Ear (1967), a
surrealistic parody of Édouard Manet’s
Déjeuner sur l’herbe, in which a series
of deformed organisms and upturned
pieces of furniture attend a repast of
a single ear on a plate that is set, in-
stead of in Manet’s verdant forest, in a
blanched, Bacon- like amphitheater.
In 1968 Lassnig left for New York on
the advice of Nancy Spero, who told
her that female artists had a much eas-
ier time succeeding there. Lettner sug-
gests another reason for her departure:
she was frightened and appalled by
the street riots that broke out in Paris
in the summer of 1968, and she pitied
the police who did battle with what she
considered spoiled, bourgeois children
rebelling out of “silver spoon” privi-
lege. In this she shared the feelings of
Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose films she
admired and who wrote an infamous
poem taking the side of the policemen
pelted by protesters in Rome.
In New York, Lassnig became mes-
merized by the many movies on tele-
vision, often watching several a day,
when she was not viewing her favorite
sitcom, The Odd Couple. (In Kantate,
she assures us that even in old age,
“my television helps me through the
night.”) The passion for cinema that
she had nurtured in Paris, combined
with her oft- repeated belief that art-
ists must constantly change their style,
led her to explore filmmaking. After
attending some courses in animation
and frequenting screenings at the Mil-
lennium Film Workshop, Anthology
Film Archives, and the Film- Maker’s
Cooperative, Lassnig cobbled together
a primitive studio and storyboard
table to assemble her experimental
animations, despite her antipathy to
technology and machines (including
a typewriter on which she had briefly
trained in an attempt to make extra
money as a typist). When asked why
she was suddenly interested in making
films, she said, “New York is a film city;
of course films are made there.” In one
self- portrait, she portrayed herself with
a movie camera affixed to her face as a
prosthesis.
Though she continued to draw and
paint, Lassnig’s energies increasingly
focused on filmmaking, and in 1974 she
cofounded Women/Artist/ Filmmakers,
Inc., a collective of ten women whose
primary purposes were to offer mutual
support and inspiration and to share
funding, ideas, and opportunities for
exhibition. Typically acerbic, she even-
tually dismissed all her colleagues in
the collective (except for the radical
Carolee Schneemann) as “sentimen-
talists,” and though invigorated by the
women’s movement, she preferred not
to be labeled a feminist. She later in-
sisted on using the male form of the
German word for artist (Künstler) for
herself, and she wanted her work mea-
sured against that of the most eminent
artists, all men. She asked, “What
does Baselitz think of me, what aboutRichter? What does Lucian Freud say
about my work?” (The two male artists
to whom she would most profitably be
compared are Martin Kippenberger
and Philip Guston.)Lassnig’s films enjoyed considerable
success, but until now have not received
the same sustained critical attention as
her paintings. A fine new volume of
essays, Maria Lassnig: Film Works,
while occasionally burdening what are
mostly modest works with excess the-
ory, offers a wealth of information and
analysis about this important aspect of
her art. The anthology includes a se-
ries of brief appreciations of Lassnig
by curators, friends, and artists—some
of whom note her thorny, mercurial
nature and her social anxieties—a se-
lection of insightful essays by both art
and film scholars, a generous offering
of pages from her notebooks, and an
exhaustive annotated filmography, the
hallmark of publications from the Aus-
trian Film Museum.
Lassnig’s so- called canonical films,
in which she draws on such childhood
memories as being taught that chairs
are not lifeless but sentient objects
(Chairs, 1971) and her mother’s visit
to a psychic who predicted that Maria
would become a great artist (Palm-
istry, 1973), have long been available
on a DV D simply titled Maria Lassnig:
Animation Films.^3 Like other feminist
filmmakers of the 1970s, such as Ba-
bette Mangolte and Yvonne Rainer,
Lassnig was drawn to the dance film.
One of her earliest works, Baroque
Statues (1970 –1974), opens in the Gurk
Cathedral in Carinthia where she was
baptized, her handheld camera survey-
ing statues of the four evangelists and
their respective attributes. In a series of
crude match cuts—edits that match an
action, sound, or object from one com-
position to the next—Lassnig rhymes
a writing quill in a statue’s hand with
one wielded by a woman’s hand out-
side, her nails painted a pulsating red
and the feather on her quill in fuchsia.
The film then departs the carved inert-
ness of the statues to offer an ecstatic
study in motion, as a young woman in a
heavily brocaded dress begins a dance
with some Martha Graham poses be-
fore whirling like a dervish through an
alpine meadow, becoming a crimson,
lavalike blur as the music segues from
the baroque (Lassnig’s favorites, Bach
and Handel) to the granitic splendor of
Bruckner.
Other dance films turned up in a trove
of Lassnig’s “films in progress,” which
the artist had consigned to a trunk to
be opened only after her death, and
which are included on a DV D attached
to the back jacket of Film Works. Un-
like the Portuguese master Manoel
de Oliveira, who decreed that his film
Visit, or Memories and Confessions be
exhibited only posthumously, Lassnig
did not intend to pique speculation
about the hidden material, but rather
wanted to concentrate on painting and
teaching after she was lured back to
Austria to become a professor at the
Vienna University of Applied Arts.
(The films seem to have represented a
past from which she wanted a decisive
break, and she abandoned some hurt
and puzzled companions from New
York in the process.)In many ways, the unfinished films
that Lassnig set aside turn out to be
superior to the ones she completed;
they frequently revisit her themes and
motifs but with a greater sophistication
of means and sureness of tone. The two
dance films found in Lassnig’s trunk
last one and two minutes, respectively.
The longer one, Autumn Thoughts
(circa 1975), features a bare- chested
male leaping and pirouetting through
a forest, an obvious homage to Maya
Deren’s classic dance film A Study in
Choreography for Camera (1945), in-
tercut with shots of Lassnig shambling
along in a body wrapping, barely able
to move, an image of female incarcera-
tion. The contrast between immobility
and freedom, confinement and motion,
recalls Baroque Statues, but the conci-
sion of Autumn Thoughts intensifies its
effect. Aside from The Princess and the
Shepherd. A Fairytale (1976 –1978), a
twee, overlong fantasy, the other newly
discovered films similarly benefit from
brevity, and their humor relies more on
Lassnig’s sardonic wit and less on the
cloying whimsy of, say, her venerated
Art Education (1976), which turns the
tables on Vermeer by having one of his
young female subjects take his place
at the easel to paint him while cooing,
“Honey, you’re a wonderful model.”
In general, the music tracks in the
newly available works are more tightly
tethered to the rhythms and visual
tonalities of the films. For instance,
the shuttling between two pieces by
Schoenberg and Morton Subotnick’s
electronic Tou c h—Lassnig repeatedly
used both the Second Viennese School
and the Subotnick—lends a piercing
aural density to perhaps the best of
her rediscovered films, Moonlanding/
Janus Head, a blizzard of imagery
intended to evoke America in all its
crazed beauty, sports mania, and incip-
ient violence.
Filmmaking seemed to make Lassnig
more generous, less prone to the ri-
valry and resentment she often expe-
rienced in the art world. In a series
called Soul Sisters, discovered in the
trunk, she offers three loving portraits
of women she considered soulmates.
Alice looks directly back to one of
Lassnig’s best- known films, Iris, by
featuring another nude odalisque, here
squirting herself with red wine out of
a decanter as fireworks burst over her
body in superimposition, meant to
capture how, in Lassnig’s words, she
“appeared in the New York art scene
like a sparkling comet” and disap-
peared just as quickly. In a silent film,
Mountain Woman, she captures the
quotidian life of a Carinthian peasant
farmer, a filmic analogue to a series of
portraits she painted in tribute to her
compatriots.
Lassnig also learned to be generous
to herself as she aged, and by the time
she made Kantate, a mock musical bio-
pic, she could review her turbulent life
with a kind of wry serenity. Huskily
intoning a ballad that summarizes her
existence from newborn to old age
over a hurdy- gurdy drone, she plays
dress- up, donning an array of costumes
to reflect the various stages of her peri-
patetic life. Festooned with the medals
and awards she accumulated along the
way, she goes on to sing in a Harlequin
sweater, “Now I love the world with
all my might,” as she caresses a globe,
leaving far behind the artist who had
declared in 1962, “I don’t love anybody.
Nobody loves me.” Q(^2) A major retrospective of Mitchell’s
work will be on view at the San Fran-
cisco Museum of Modern Art through
January 17 and will then travel to Balti-
more and Paris. See Jed Perl’s review in
these pages, November 4, 2021.
(^3) Distributed in North America by Gar-
tenberg Media.
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