Maria Lassnig’s Haunting Paintings Reflect How Women See Themselves

Throughout her long career, painter Maria Lassnig obsessively explored the idea of “body awareness,” which translated corporeal sensation to canvas. Via color and line, she aimed to depict how doubt, anxiety, tenderness, and grief really felt in the body. Though Lassnig’s practice ranged from spare abstractions to vivid portraits, and eventually to film, her major subject remained her own, visceral experience. The artist always seemed to be working out the same problems: how to see oneself clearly; how to delineate one’s boundaries; and how to reconcile one’s interiority and exteriority.

According to a new biography by Natalie Lettner (copublished by Hauser & Wirth, the Maria Lassnig Foundation, and Petzel), Lassnig emphasized that “body awareness” was “not about femininity, let alone biologically determined femininity.” Yet womanhood and its attendant expectations seem central to much of Lassnig’s work and life story. Her paintings also chart a dawning, if complicated, feminist awareness. As Lettner writes, “This is one of the reasons why many women appreciate her paintings so much: they don’t just portray Lassnig but women in general.…Lassnig’s portraits show how women perceive themselves as subjects.”

Lassnig was born in Carinthia, in southern Austria, in 1919. Like her mother Mathilde before her, she was conceived out of wedlock. Lassnig did not meet her father, Anton Hubinger, until she was 22 years old. Though he hailed from a noble family, Lassnig herself grew up amid financial instability—until her mother married a baker named Jakob Lassnig. He adopted the six-year-old Maria and helped mother and daughter achieve what Lettner describes as a middle-class existence.

Still, Mathilde “blamed the child for her life situation.” Lassnig, for the rest of her life, considered herself an “unwanted child” who’d “forced her mother ‘into an unhappy marriage.’” From an early age, Lassnig knew she wanted to paint, and she began studying at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1940, while in her early twenties. She soon turned her familial preoccupations into art.

The biography includes a reproduction of Lassnig’s Family Portrait from 1947, which features mother, stepfather, and daughter staring past one another. Meine Eltern (My Parents) (1948) is a gloomy, black-and-white sketch of a man and woman in bed, looking away from each other. A much later work, Large Family Portrait (2003), depicts a man on a motorcycle that appears ready to run over a naked young woman—an avatar for Lassnig herself—while the nude mother figure averts her gaze.

Given such perceptions of marriage and family life, it’s no wonder that Lassnig sought alternatives. At 28, she embarked on a torrid relationship with the 18-year-old artist Arnulf Rainer. Competition ensued, with Lassnig ultimately feeling that Rainer received better reception in Austrian artist circles (probably due in part to his gender).

Throughout the 1940s, Lassnig integrated Surrealist tenets into her work, creating “self-portraits” that, as Lettner writes, “show no complete body but fragments into which she dismantled her body perceptions.” Sex Self-Portrait (1949) features an exuberant jumble of shadings, geometries, and corporeal forms, while Self-Portrait as an Ear (1949) reduces the self to a single sensory organ. Lassnig’s series of “Headnesses,” from the 1950s, conceive of her subjects as featureless, geometric busts.

Throughout the 1950s, Lassnig developed spare, circular abstractions that she called her “dumpling” paintings. These round compositions, she said, depict the body “as something closed, as enclosed as possible.” Yet Lassnig also spoke about the forms as “having been snipped from the umbilical cord.” Lettner notes that Lassnig was in her thirties by this time, thinking about “her ticking biological clock.” Instead of having children, Lassnig made “dumplings.”

It’s easy, in 2022, to see feminist concerns throughout such work. Yet the artist only developed any kind of political consciousness after 1968, when she was 49 and moved to New York. In the city, Lassnig experienced the exploding feminist movement. A talk by major feminist thinker Kate Millett especially inspired her.

Lassnig began working in video art and joined a community that called itself the Women Artist Filmmakers and counted Carolee Schneemann among its members. “Lassnig felt comfortable in this circle of women,” Lettner writes. “Here, she could relax and let go.” The artist developed strong relationships with the women around her, from artists to her younger neighbor and eventual muse, Iris Vaughan.

Though Lassnig had finally found a community, and the kind of acceptance she missed in her earlier years, her painting style still veered towards an eerie, haunting sensibility. Blindingly bright or moodily muted backgrounds and skin tones pervaded her oeuvre, as did concerns about illness. Her mother’s 1964 death, from liver cancer, had forced her to face her own mortality. For years, in what Lettner calls “a kind of empathic over-identification,” Lassnig feared for the health of her own liver and transmuted this angst into her own work (she even made a Liver Self-Portrait, reducing her body to that one worrisome part).