Maria Lassnig: Becoming Female in History

Abstract

The author analyses Maria Lassnig’s visual autobiography, her creation of painterly temporalities, and her record of bodily experiences. The article concentrates on Lassnig’s experiencing her historicity and her distinctive way of feminizing the process of its construction. Her historicity is seen here as framed by the ways she measures the distance between her experience as a woman and the medium of painting, herself, and other women artists, her forms of visual resistance and struggles vis-à-vis theirs. Lassnig performs her historicity in painting (and on the canvas) in the timespan of decades and in relation to other forms of female autobiographical performances in the sphere of the visual, social and political. This relational perspective remains crucial for positioning of Lassnig on the map of the feminist critique of both image and history. The author looks at some of the artist’s self-portraits as stages in a lifelong work of self-reflection and self-inscription into the world and painting, as well as conversely, of the inscription of the world and painting onto woman’s history and her body.