A Painter in Search of an Audience: Marie-Louise von Motesiczky in Exile

Marie-Louise von Motesiczky was born into a wealthy, aristocratic Jewish family in Vienna in 1906. She trained under the German painter Max Beckmann, a family friend, and embarked on a promising career. When the National Socialists marched into Austria in 1938 Motesiczky fled the country for the Netherlands, eventually settling in England. Her attempts to build a new life in a foreign country were supported by a network of fellow émigrés, among them the painter Oskar Kokoschka and the writer Elias Canetti, with whom she had a long relationship.

In a career that spanned over seven decades she created a large oeuvre of over three hundred paintings, mainly portraits, self-portraits and still-lifes. Reluctant to exhibit and not forced to sell her work for a living, her art developed away from the public eye, independent of current trends. Although, over the decades, she had a number of solo exhibitions both in her adopted country and abroad, her artistic career failed to take off for a long time.

While her solo exhibition at the Wiener Secession in 1966 brought her artistic recognition in her native country, her breakthrough in England only came in 1985 with a solo exhibition at the Goethe-Institut in London. Since then her reputation as a major émigré artist has steadily grown, supported, after her death in 1996, by the activities of the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust.

Lecture by Ines Schlenker, introduced and moderated by Rachel Stern.

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Ines Schlenker is an independent art historian with a special interest in National Socialist, ‘degenerate’ and émigré art. Hitler’s Salon, her study of the officially approved art in the Third Reich as shown at the Great German Art Exhibition, was published in 2007. She wrote the catalogue raisonné of the paintings of the Vienna-born émigré Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (2009), co-edited the artist’s correspondence with the writer Elias Canetti (2011) and curated the exhibition at Tate Britain, London, that celebrated the opening of the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Archive Gallery in 2019. Recent publications include Capturing Time, a study of the life and work of the émigré artist Milein Cosman (2019), and Chagall (2022). She is a member of the committee of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies.

Rachel Stern is the Director of The Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art in New York.

This event is part of the monthly series “Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression,” which is organized by The Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art, New York. Future events and the recordings of past events can be found here.

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