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11 April
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13 August 2006 Tate Liverpool |
Motesiczky created the first of a moving series devoted to her ageing mother, Henriette von Motesiczky – Portrait No.1 in 1929. By the time Henriette died in 1978 at the age of 96, Motesiczky had painted a number of haunting portraits of her, recording the ravages of old age. Gombrich compared these to Dürer's charcoal portrait of his mother, which, like those by Motesiczky, were powerful and heartbreakingly honest.
The mother portraits dominated Motesiczky's work during the 1960s and 70s and these years witnessed an ever closer bond between mother and daughter. In a radio interview, Motesiczky remembered her mother as an unusual woman, a real 'character', natural and like a big child, who loved the countryside, dogs and hunting. The artist devoted much of her life to caring for her increasingly frail mother. This became progressively restricting and often prevented her from painting. The mother portraits provided a means of reconciling the duty of care towards her mother and her desire to continue painting.
In spite of their close relationship and companionship for most of the artist's life, in the mother portraits Motesiczky achieves a distanced objectivity: these portraits are frank and unflattering, yet tender. The late portraits From Night into Day 1975 and Mother with Baton 1977 convey the fragility of her emaciated body, with her stick-thin arms and the now pronounced facial features of a bulbous nose and large, dark, sunken eyes. Mother in Bed c.1977/78, executed in the last year of Henriette's life, succeeds in showing the approach of death. In The Greenhouse 1979, a memorial to her, she is depicted raking leaves in the garden at sunset, surrounded by her beloved Italian greyhounds.