A Valentine in Memory of Maria Lassnig, who passed away at the ripe old age of 94 in 2014
"Art begins with brain science, and also with the science of feelings."
Letters from Vienna #20
A Valentine in Memory of Maria Lassnig, who passed away at the ripe old age of 94 in 2014
Maria Lassnig, Mann sich entzweischneidend (Man cutting himself in two), 1986 Öl auf Leinwand (oil on canvas)
Some don’t like Maria Lassnig’s emphasis on psychology but she once told me that an artist must always dig deep within themselves. This is good advice for everybody; not merely artists. Nothing is worse than superficiality or smug complacency. If there is a shortlist of reasons for the current crisis: superficiality and smug complacency are two of the highest order.
Her work throws up an awful lot of interesting questions: what are the limits of knowledge and perception? What should the focus of the artist be? What is the role, if any, of gender in art?
Maria Lassnig, Woman Power 1979, oil on canvas
Maris Lassnig was born in September 1919 in Carinthia, in an unlikely place called Kappel am Krappfeld (roughly a day’s march away from Griffen, where Peter Handke was born), and for most of her life she focused on her own body and served as her own model. For most of her life she was bitterly poor, could seldom afford more than a minimum to eat, and could rarely pay a model. When she did paint others: they were usually friends. Like most artists she accepted poverty as a precondition to her profession. Like Handke, there was an ascetic hardiness, independence, and resilience to her being. Like Handke, this was tempered by a fine sensibility, high intelligence and benevolent kindness. And both were and are driven by a fierce ambition to excel in the realm of art.
Maria Lassnig, Sleeping with a Tiger, oil on canvas
“Art”, she once wrote, “begins with brain science, and also with the science of feelings. Art grows from burst soap bubbles, from shriveled hearts from the spying cerebellum.”[1] This reminds me of W.H. Auden, who once said that poets enchant for the sake of disenchanting.
She was born in the wake of one war (at the time of the “Spanish Flu” (which was neither a flu nor Spanish)) and studied art in the midst of another conflagration. She was consequently well aware of the ephemeral nature of life: “Only the thought of the fleeting journey on earth enables us to participate in eternity. Thus, a slightly open door is more likely to cause us to act than the self-contained coziness of a room, and a pressing deadline impels more urgently than infinite time.”[2]
Her life was filled with an urgent need to produce up until her very last day; artists don’t “retire”, they simply stop breathing. Indeed, artists who fail to produce or who make fundamental concessions have a bad habit of perishing prematurely. Art can be a profession, a vocation yet also a curse. An artist must produce, regardless of circumstance. Whether what is produced is any good or not is another matter entirely; not every artist is actually “talented” (though this term is ultimately meaningless) or has the circumstances necessary to develop. This is all ultimately a question of “fate” or “luck”.
“When, in my painting,” Maria Lassnig once wrote “I became tired of analytically depicting nature, I searched for a reality that was more fully in my possession than the exterior world, and I found it waiting for me in the body house in which I dwell, the realest and clearest reality. I only needed to become aware of it in order to be able to project its imprints as fixed focal points onto the picture plane. You can become aware of your body through pressure, through tension by straining one part of it in a particular physical position; in other words, awareness is expressed in sensations of pressure or tension, in sensations of fullness or emptiness, etc. the question now is, whether:
1) Realistic associations of memory should be switched off or used, i.e. whether I paint the leg or the hand realistically, as I saw it, or whether I paint it as a staff, the way I feel it, or as wire, string, sausage, or not at all.
2) I only partially screen myself from the outside world, i.e. when I sit in front of a table with apples on it, whether I really see it and paint it, while only allowing myself to cling to it like a pair of pliers, i.e. allowing my emotional shoulder blades to extend, as pliers, into the optical table.
3) In a picture, I combine memory’s realistic associations with freely invented sensations, for example the body, painted like a fire screen, to which realistic pudenda (genitals) is affixed.”[3]
Maria Lassnig, Self-portrait with Staff, 1971, oil on canvas
The artist, and by inference: everyone, has to start with themselves, with their own experience and observed reality. Yet this is not enough. Everyone, not merely the artist, needs to activate both memory and imagination. They also need to study, to read and to reflect on the nature of the reality which surrounds them.
In the case of the current crisis for example: observed reality is important. Do I see piles of bodies in the street? No, therefore: I am not confronted with a “pandemic” on the dimensions or of the style of the Black Plague. Have Scamdemics happened before? Yes, most recently in 2009 but also in 1976. In fact, if one digs deeper: there is a whole string of them. But perhaps the key is the imagination: can one imagine that someone, such as Bill Gates, could profit from human misery on an unprecedented scale? Yes, undoubtedly. Sadly, the imagination is the least developed quality in modern man, which is why art needs to be cultivated and artists paid for their services rendered. But I digress.
The last question I wish to address in this essay is the one of gender. Maria Lassnig occasionally (in New York for example) worked together with other females and protested injustice toward women yet didn’t see herself as a “feminist”, partly because she had a justified wariness toward ideologies but also because she didn’t want to be pigeonholed. She wanted to excel as an artist but not as a “female artist” and sometimes could be unduly harsh on female rivals such as Birgit Jürgensen, whose early death was undoubtedly linked to her inability to develop her skills to the full.
It is vital, and the issue is more pressing now than ever before, that we reflect upon psychology in general and, above all else: our own psychology. We must forever dig within ourselves (in a productive rather than destructive fashion) and we must continually ask about the limits of knowledge, memories and perception.
[1] p.21 Maria Lassnig, Works, Diaries & Writings
[2] Ebenda
[3] p.32 Maria Lassnig, Works, Diaries & Writings