Maria Lassnig

Maria Lassnig: Painting Only What She Could Feel

"I step in front of the canvas naked, as it were," Maria Lassnig said of her method. "I have no set purpose, plan, model or photography. I let things happen. But I do have a starting-point, which has come from my realization that the only true reality are my feelings, played out within the confines of my body." The rule she derived from this was brutally restrictive: paint only the parts of yourself you can actually sense at the moment of painting. Whatever you cannot feel does not get painted. The results are figures with missing limbs, hollowed torsos, faces dissolving where attention has drifted — self-portraits that are accurate to sensation rather than to appearance. She followed the rule for sixty-six years.

Carinthia

Lassnig was born on 8 September 1919 in Kappel am Krappfeld, in the Austrian province of Carinthia, out of wedlock. Her mother later married, but the relationship was difficult and Lassnig was raised largely by her grandmother. The illegitimacy and the displacement matter: her lifelong subject was a body experienced from the inside, belonging to nobody else and answerable to nobody's approval.

She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna during the Second World War, in an institution still governed by the aesthetic orthodoxies of the regime, and moved beyond state-sanctioned realism at the first opportunity. In 1948, at twenty-nine, she coined the term *Körperbewusstsein* — body consciousness, or body awareness — for the practice she had begun to develop. She would spend the rest of her career elaborating a single idea she had arrived at before she was thirty.

Informel, Paris, and the Dog Pack

In the 1950s Lassnig was among those who brought Informel and Tachisme into Austrian art, working through surrealism and automatism along the way. She belonged to the Hundsgruppe — the Dog Pack — an abstract expressionist collective that made itself a nuisance in a conservative Viennese scene.

In 1951 she travelled to Paris with Arnulf Rainer and met André Breton, along with the poets Paul Celan and Benjamin Péret. She moved to Paris properly in 1960. What she found there did not deflect her; the body-awareness project continued underneath the shifting styles.

New York

In 1968, aged forty-nine, Lassnig moved to New York — an age at which most artists are consolidating rather than emigrating. She stayed twelve years. Between 1970 and 1972 she studied animated film at the School of Visual Arts and made six short films; her best-known, *Kantate* of 1992, is a filmic self-portrait set to songs and music, in which she narrates her own life while drawn versions of herself perform it. She had reasoned, correctly, that a medium built from successive drawings might capture the flux of bodily sensation better than a single static canvas.

The New York years also pushed her painting outward. Alongside the introspective self-portraits she took up external realism, portraits and still lifes, and developed the contrasting palette — acid greens, pinks, blues — that gives her later work its psychological charge. Red recurs throughout, often suggesting pain but frequently just intensity of feeling.

The First Woman

In 1980 Lassnig returned to Vienna to take a professorship at the University of Applied Arts, becoming the first female professor of painting in any German-speaking country. She was sixty-one. That a country produces its first woman in such a chair in 1980, and that the woman in question had been working at full power since the 1940s, is the shape of her career in one fact.

Recognition arrived slowly and then all at once. The Grand Austrian State Prize came in 1988, the Max Beckmann Prize in 2004, and in 2013, at ninety-three, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. Her late work, the so-called Drastic Pictures, turned to mortality, generational conflict and oppression — an old woman painting what an old body reports, with no softening.

Why Maria Is Called a Genius

The faculty is a rare kind of epistemic discipline: she identified a source of evidence nobody else was systematically using, and then obeyed it for six decades against every incentive to stop.

Western figure painting had run on two inputs — the model in front of the artist and the image in the artist's memory. Lassnig proposed a third: proprioception, the body's report on itself. Pressure, tension, weight, the felt volume of a jaw or a shoulder. She acknowledged that these sensations were extraordinarily difficult to render visually, and made that difficulty the whole content of the work. The paintings are not expressive distortions of an observed body; they are attempts at accurate transcription of a different data stream, and the strangeness is a consequence of fidelity rather than style. That is an artist thinking like an investigator, and it is why her canvases look like nobody else's rather than like a school.

The counter-case deserves stating. Lassnig produced no theory beyond a term and some statements about method, and the concept is unfalsifiable — no viewer can verify that a given passage corresponds to a sensation she actually had, so the work's authority ultimately rests on trusting her. She spent an entire career on one idea, which can be read as depth or as narrowness. And her elevation to canonical status came very late and coincided with a broad institutional correction toward women artists who had been overlooked, which makes the acclaim harder to separate from the correction. The available sources do not record anyone calling her a genius outright; what they record is the Golden Lion, a run of major retrospectives at MoMA PS1, Tate Liverpool, the Albertina and the Stedelijk, and a direct influence on painters including Nicole Eisenman and Dana Schutz — evidence of consequence rather than of a word.

Legacy

Lassnig died on 6 May 2014, aged ninety-four. The Maria Lassnig Foundation was established the following year to look after an oeuvre that had been produced largely without a market. Her position — as she described it, a female artist in a predominantly male world, using her own body as her primary material — turned out to anticipate a great deal of what figurative painting would become. She got there in 1948 and simply waited.

Achievements

• Max Beckmann prize — 2004
• City of Vienna Prize for Fine Arts — 1977
• Grand Austrian State Prize — 1988
• Movement: feminist art and Informalism