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Marie-Louise Von Motesiczky is known for her intimate portraits and symbolic still life paintings. Born into an aristocratic Jewish family, Motesiczky left Vienna at age eighteen to study at the Montparnasse Painting Academy in Paris. She continued her education at the Städel Art School in Frankfurt (1927–8) under the tutelage of the German expressionist Max Beckmann. Upon their first meeting in 1920, Beckmann became a life-long influence on her work as both friend and mentor. With the rise of Nazism, Motesiczky fled Vienna in 1938 to settle in England the following year. Here, Motesiczky became part of a community of exiled artists and intellectuals – a group which included the writer Elias Canetti (1905–94), with whom she shared a turbulent yet creatively productive relationship. A major solo exhibition at the Goethe-Institut in London in 1985 attracted enormous critical acclaim, and thereafter she became the subject of several retrospectives including at Tate Liverpool (2006) and the Fitzwilliam Museum (1986). 

Selected Collections

Ben Uri Gallery & Museum

The Fitzwilliam Museum

Leicester Museum & Art Gallery

Further Reading

Cleary, M., “Marie-Louise von Motesiczky: Re-negotiating the self-portrait as a woman émigré artist in the Nazi era,” International Journal of Cultural Property 28, no. 3 (2021): 389-407.

Gombrich, E.H. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky: Paintings, Vienna 1925 - London 1985. London: Goethe-Institut, 1985.

Lloyd, Jill. The Undiscovered Expressionist: A Life of Marie-Louise Motesiczky. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Schlenker, Ines. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings. Manchester: Hudson Hills Press Inc., 2006.