Pfingstselbstporträt

Maria Lassnig called the depiction of her own body “Pfingstselbstporträt [Pentecost Self-Portrait]” which she felt and observed from within and without. She links her present and remembered physical feelings with a figurative pictorial vocabulary and felt colours. The artist looks and feels like this when she kneels on the canvas and paints. She sees and paints both the hand with the watch that she leans on, and the bent knee. She felt and painted her body as a violet formation. Painted in 1969, the picture marks an important step in Lassnig’s path to body-awareness painting in which the artist explores the possibilities of communicating her subjective world of feeling. Writing of her “body-awareness pictures” in 1970, Lassnig notes: “when I got tired of depicting analyses of nature in my paintings I began to look for another reality that was more in my possession than the exterior world. I found it in the physical shell I inhabit [...], I only had to become aware of it, in order to be able to project an impression of it in fixed areas on the pictorial level. [...] I draw or paint a picture with my body in a particular position. For example, sitting propped up on one arm. One feels the shoulder blade, but only the upper part of the arm itself, the palm of the hand is like the support on an invalid’s walking stick. I feel the pressure points of my posterior on the divan, the stomach, because it is filled up like a sack, the head has sunk into the cardboard box of the shoulder blades [...].”