Obituary: Maria Lassnig - Painter who bared all for art

1919-2014

AUSTRIAN painter Maria Lassnig has died at the age of 94.

She was embraced by the art world only when she began to paint shockingly confrontational nudes of herself as an old woman.

Throughout an artistic career that spanned nearly 70 years, Lassnig's art went in and out of fashion in her native Austria. She lived in Vienna, Paris, New York and Berlin but remained an obscure figure on the international scene. Her work was first unleashed on British audiences as late as 2008 at a solo show at the Serpentine Gallery featuring a selection of recent self-portraits observed from life in her late 80s.

Critics were stunned and impressed by her audacity - above all by a work titled You, or Me? which depicts the artist in a cheery palette of soft pinks, blues and greens, with legs open and breasts sagging; in each hand she brandishes a gun, one pointing at her head, the other at the viewer. One reviewer's write-up warned: "Blokes are advised to bring a helmet."

Lassnig was praised for her bleak humour and insight as much as for her ability to provoke. One painting, featuring a couple with heads sheathed in plastic wrapping, was said to have been inspired by a visit to a supermarket where it dawned on her that fruit packaging was a neat metaphor for the emotional distance between people.

She refused to court trends in the art world and weathered decades of rejection from the establishment. Ultimately she would be rewarded for sticking to her guns.

"I have been working long enough to establish my own tradition, from realism through surrealism, art informel, automatism, and I don't know how many other isms," she said.

At her death she is remembered as one of the most significant Austrian painters of the past century, continuing a figurative tradition that can be traced back to Egon Schiele and even - given her taste for a muted palette - to the Austrian baroque. A retrospective of her work was recently held at MoMA in New York.

Lassnig was born on September 8 1919 in the Carinthian town of Kappel am Krappfeld. She spent the first five years of her life at her grandparents' farmhouse and did not meet her biological father until she was an adult.

After leaving the Ursuline Convent School in 1939 she trained to become a schoolteacher but, while painting portraits of the children, her ambitions changed. In the autumn of 1941, as Austria entered the darkest hours of World War 2, she rode her bicycle 300km to Vienna to take up a place at the Academy of Fine Arts, which aligned itself at the time with the realist school favoured by the Nazis.

She was technically gifted and experimented with expressionism and cubism. Classified as a "degenerate" by her teacher, Wilhelm Dachau, she was expelled from his class. I n 1980 she would return to the academy as a painting professor, a first for a woman in the German-speaking world.

Lassnig never married or had children, a conscious decision. "The dear Lord did not gift me with beauty, but the ability to paint," she said.

She famously tore around at great speed on her motorcycle but she was frightened of dying. The need to confront her own mortality caught up with her; her paintings became clearer, bolder, and more confrontational. In her late '80s, she energetically produced work after work of startlingly youthful intensity. "Art keeps me young," she sai d.

She was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale last year.