Marie-Louise von Motesiczky was born into a wealthy, aristocratic Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1906, studying under Max Beckmann in Frankfurt, Germany. Following the Anschluss in 1938, she immigrated to England with her mother, where she remained for the rest of her life, painting prolifically. A major reassessment of her career in exile took place towards the end of her life, resulting in several retrospectives, biographies, and a catalogue raisonnée.
Painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky was born into a highly influential, aristocratic Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) on 24 October 1906. Her father Edmund was a talented amateur cellist and her mother, Henriette, came from an extremely wealthy and cultured family. From age 13 Motesiczky attended art classes in her native Vienna, the Hague, Paris, Berlin, and studied at the Städel Art School in Frankfurt with leading German expressionist, Max Beckmann. After the Anschluss (annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany) in March 1938, in order to escape anti-Semitic persecution, she moved with her mother to Holland and then to Switzerland. Her brother Karl, who remained in Austria, arranged for her works to be sent to London. He was subsequently arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz, dying of typhus in 1943.
In 1939, Motesiczky held her first solo exhibition in the Hague. Shortly afterwards she and her mother immigrated to England, where they would remain for the rest of their lives. They initially settled in London's West Hampstead, an area popular with German-speaking refugees, but during the war they relocated to the countryside in Amersham, possibly following fellow émigré artist Mary Duras, whom Motesiczky had known since the 1920s. There Motesiczky met émigré writer Elias Canetti, with whom she began a turbulent lifelong relationship. In 1943 she joined the Artists’ International Association (AIA), a pro-Soviet association founded in 1933 which took an early interest in refugees from Germany and Austria. After the war Motesiczky and her mother moved back to West Hampstead and were naturalised as British subjects in 1948. Among Motesiczky’s émigré circle in London were art historian, Ernst Gombrich and his wife, painter-etcher Milein Cosman, and her husband, musicologist Hans Keller. She also reconnected with Oskar Kokoschka, who had been a family friend in Vienna. Kokoschka exerted a major influence on her work, ensuring that it was presented in a series of group shows, culminating in the exhibition of works by Motesiczky and Mary Duras at the Czechoslovak Institute in 1944. Jutta Vinzent’s analysis demonstrated ‘a discrepancy between the national identity promoted by the Czechoslovak Institute and that pursued by the artist’s works: despite exhibiting only artists with Czech citizenship, Motesiczky’s paintings reveal a strong identification with Austria but not with Czechoslovakia’ (Vinzent 2006, p. 158-165). Motesiczky received wide acclaim when her work was exhibited in Amsterdam and The Hague in 1952, one of her canvases being purchased by the Stedelijk Museum.
From 1960 Motesiczky and Henriette settled in Cornerways, Amersham. The house, filled with family heirlooms, old Viennese furniture and the von Motesiczky art collection, became a meeting place for many émigrés, among them Canetti and his wife, Veza; Kokoschka; the Prague-born poet and anthropologist, Franz Baermann Steiner, and Frederick Kankam Boadu, a student and anti-colonial activist from The Gold Coast (now Ghana). Motesiczky’s prolific oeuvre comprised portraits, self-portraits, still-lifes, landscapes and allegorical paintings, characterised by psychological insight and an interest in exploring human character and female subjectivity. She once said: ‘For me, anything with a figure, is a story’ (The Independent obituary). The portraits of her aging mother were among Motesiczky’s most psychologically powerful and moving works. The artist made a total of 18 portraits from the mid-1940s until Henriette’s death in 1978, showing her smoking a pipe, with her dog, driving her three-wheeled electric car (The Short Trip (1954), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen) or, most often, in bed (From Night into Day, Tate Gallery) painted in 1977 when Henriette was 93. The apogee of Motesiczky's career was in England in 1985, when a major retrospective was presented at the Goethe Institute, London. The catalogue preface was written by Gombrich, who compared Durer's charcoal drawings of his mother with Motesiczky's works, finding in them ‘a similar kind of detachment [in] recording the relentless advance of old age’ (Daily Telegraph obituary). Her career was also celebrated by an exhibition of 70 works held at Tate Liverpool (2006) and in Vienna (2008). A catalogue raisonné was published by the Motesiczky Charitable Trust in 2009. Her works also featured in Ben Uri's exhibitions focussing on émigré artists, including Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain c. 1933-1945 (2009-10) and, more recently, Out of Austria (2018), as well as in Migrations held at Tate Britain (2012).
Marie-Louise von Motesiczky died in London, England on 10 June 1996. Her work is held in many public collections in the UK, including the British Museum, National Portrait Gallery and Tate in London (which also holds her archive); Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester, and National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. In 2019 the Tate Archive Gallery was renamed the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Archive Gallery in recognition of the donation from her charitable trust (the largest gift ever received by the Archive); the opening display featured many items from her own extensive archives.