Anightatthecircus

THE BEN URI art gallery has acquired an important late career painting by VienneseJewish émigrée artist Marie-Louise von Motesiczky at a rare sale. Circus Scene (1964) is one of only a handful of works offered for sale from the collection of the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Trust, the first time a group of her paintings has been presented at auction. Her work has been previously exhibited at the gallery, but this is the first painting of hers to be bought for the collection. It will be shown in the next exhibition of new acquisitions and longterm loans at the Ben Uri in 2021, alongside other recent important acquisitions by Georg Ehrlich and Peter Howson, among others. The painting was inspired by a circus performance attended by the artist and is loosely based on three photographs taken at the time. During her years in England, the influence of Motesiczky’s early mentor Max Beckmann gave way to that of Oskar Kokoschka, apparent in the looser, freer brushwork and softer, less angular figures. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna, Austria in 1906. She left school at the age of 13 and attended art classes in Vienna, The Hague, Frankfurt, Paris, and Berlin before being invited in 1927/8, to join Max Beckmann’s masterclass in Frankfurt. Following the Anschluss, she resettled in England with her mother, participating in group exhibitions and holding solo London shows including one at the Czechoslovak Institute in 1944, the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1960, and the Goethe Institute in 1985 — the latter bringing great late critical acclaim and cementing her reputation as an important twentiethcentury figurative painter. benuri.org