“The perfect artist for the age of the selfie” was how one critic described the painter Maria Lassnig. She was still startling audiences with her nude portraits in her Eighties. She opened her debut exhibition in Britain — at the Serpentine Gallery — just before her 90th birthday. It featured a self-portrait in which she was naked, with open legs and sagging breasts, and pointing a gun. She said that she wanted to express what it felt like to be inside an 89-year-old body. “Visiting blokes are advised to bring a helmet,” wrote one reviewer.
Lassnig’s artistic career had spanned more than 70 years. She painted vibrant, often distorted human torsos which were influenced by realism, surrealism, cubism and, as she said, “I don’t know how many other isms.” As a girl, she consciously made the decision not to have a family of her own. “When I was young, I was clever enough to know that if I got married or had children, I would be eaten. I would be sick if I couldn’t paint . . . So I renounced it.”
She continued to paint, working several hours a day, despite her declining health. She used various lovers or her neighbours in Austria — including her local priest — as her models.
Born out of wedlock, Maria Lassnig spent the first five years of her childhood living with her grandparents at their farmhouse in the Austrian town of Kappel am Krappfeld. Some years later, her mother married her adoptive father. She only met her biological father after she reached adulthood.
Lassnig developed her style of painting when she enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna during the Second World War. She began to depict her fantasies and nightmares through the human body, calling her style “Körperbilder” or “body awareness”: “I step in front of the canvas naked, as it were. I have no set purpose . . . I let things happen.” As a student, she was once expelled from a class, accused of being “degenerate”.
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Her rising success in Austria was rewarded with a scholarship to study in Paris. Here she met the forerunner of surrealism, André Breton. Following the death of her mother, she moved to New York where she became fascinated with painting plastic after seeing so many supermarket-wrapped fruit and vegetables. In the 1980s she took up a post as professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and was still teaching in her 70s. Her dream was to show at MoMA PS1 in New York, which she achieved this year.
Lassnig adored entertaining friends in Vienna and Carinthia, in rural southern Austria. She was known to make apple strudels up to a week in advance of their arrival. For her 85th birthday she danced a waltz at the Ritz. She refused offers of a lift by car and took the tram.
Maria Lassnig, artist, was born on September 8, 1919. She died on May 6, 2014, aged 94