(Kappel, Carinthia, 1919–2014 Vienna)
Portrait, signed, dated M. Lassnig 1976, oil on canvas, 97 x 90 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private Collection, Vienna - directly from the artist

From an e-mail from the owner:
...was created in Berlin in 1976.
maria had a DAAD scholarship in berlin at the time, which oswald wiener had arranged through wieland schmied. oswald had also set up an exhibition for her by renting a vacant shop on uhlandstraße. the exhibition was there and i was the gallery assistant. about 10 visitors came in the 2 weeks (or 3?) that the exhibition lasted. nothing was sold either. i would have liked to buy something, but maria had too high a price in mind. i would have liked the "sleeping with a tiger", but she wanted 8,000 marks for it, which was a lot of money, about 5 months' salary at the time. but she said she would like to do a portrait of me, and that would be much cheaper. and so we did it. it wasn’t easy, because i had to be at the studio every morning at 10am on the dot, because of the light...
(Maria Lassnig was in Berlin in 1976, she received the DAAD scholarship in 1978).

1980
ML to the students:

Art is a therapeutic process. I no longer think it is enough just to look at the world, to draw in order to learn how to see. It borders on exploitation, because then I am saying that the world only has a right to exist insofar as it is there for me. When I look at a person and draw a picture, more has to happen than just learning to see. I have to respond to the person, that is, I have to give up a part of myself. Otherwise it becomes a self-portrait. Because that's what everyone tends to do, thin artists create thin figures like themselves, fat artists create fat ones. One only sees oneself in the world, like in a mirror. I was delighted to read Viktor Frankl’s confirmation of this claim:

"Only to the extent that I step back, denying my suchness, does something become visible to me that is more than just myself again. Such self-denial is always the price I have to pay for knowledge of the world. In a word, I must look beyond myself; if I cannot, then my ability to recognise other things is already impaired, as my own self-recognition then stands in my way."
From: Maria Lassnig. Die Feder ist die Schwester des Pinsels, Tagebücher 1943 bis 1997, edited by Ulrich Obrist, DuMont 2000