Mariette Lydis

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Mariette Lydis (1936)

Mariette Lydis ( August 24, 1887 in Baden - April 26, 1970 in Buenos Aires ) was an Austrian-Argentine painter and illustrator .

Life

Mariette Lydis' apartment at 55 Rue Boileau, Paris (1936)

Mariette Lydis was born as Marietta Ronsperger, daughter of Franz Ronsperger (1845–1918) and his wife Eugenia, nee. Fischer (1861–1934) born in Baden. She had two siblings, Richard and the writer Edith Ronsperger (1880–1921), who wrote opera librettos. After leaving the Israelite Religious Community in 1909 , she converted to Roman Catholicism in 1910 and changed her first name to Maria Paula. In 1910 she married the Viennese businessman Julius Koloman Pachoffer-Karny (1877–1922). She divorced and married the Greek entrepreneur Jean Lydis in 1917, with whom she moved to Castella near Athens in 1922. Their marriage lasted until 1925. She left her husband because of an affair with Massimo Bontempelli , whom she met in Florence in 1925 . In 1926 she settled in Paris. An affair with Joseph Delteil in Paris followed in 1928 . In her third marriage, she was married to the publisher Giuseppe Conte Govone (1886-1948) from 1934 until his death. In 1939 she fled Paris with her publisher and presumably lover Erica Marx and settled briefly in Winchcombe , England. Fearing that England would be invaded by the National Socialists, she embarked for Buenos Aires in September 1940 and, with the exception of brief stays in Europe after the end of the Second World War, stayed in Argentina, where she continued her artistic career.

Mariette Lydis was openly bisexual.

She died in Buenos Aires in 1970 and was buried in the La Recoleta cemetery there.

Artistic career

Mariette Lydis was an autodidact . Her early work was influenced by the Wiener Werkstätte . Her first published work was 20 illustrations that were stylistically based on Chinese or oriental-esoteric imagery, based on which Béla Balázs wrote stories through the agency of Eugenie Schwarzwald and which were published in 1922 under the title The Mantle of Dreams . In 1924 her 42 miniatures on the Koran were published . She made several trips to Morocco, Egypt and Turkey, which were a source of artistic inspiration for her. Bontempelli, with whom she came to France in 1925, introduced her to the artistic circles in Paris through Henry de Montherlant . In 1928 Le Petit Jésus appeared together with Joseph Delteil, for whom she created five illustrations.

In 1928 her work was shown in the renowned galleries Bernheim-Jeune and Girard as well as in the Salon d'Automne of the Parisian avant-garde; she published her first portfolio, Lesbiennes . She illustrated luxury issues & a. the works of Pierre Louÿs , Charles Baudelaire , Octave Mirbeau , Paul Valéry , Paul Verlaine and Jules Supervielle . Through her publisher and later husband Giuseppe Govone she met Erica Marx, the daughter of the English book and art collector Hermann Marx. Mariette and Erica became close friends and almost certainly lovers.

In 1936, Lydis was selected for the Museum of Modern Art in New York as one of only three women for the seminal exhibition Modern Painters and Sculptors as Illustrators .

In 1948 she returned to France and illustrated works by Guy de Maupassant , Colette , Baudelaire , Rimbaud , Bella Moerel and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James . She returned to Buenos Aires in the early 1950s.

There were two important artistic phases in her career, the first darker and sadder, as she focused on portraits of poor and old people, destitute people, criminals and the sick. Later she painted and drew more women, adolescents and small children. Throughout her career, she was influenced by the Japanese artist Tsuguharu Foujita , whom she met in Montmartre .

In addition to her illustrations, Lydis is known for her lithographic images that are themed on lesbian and bisexual relationships. She drew women more like heterosexual relationships with an active and passive role and one of the women more with a masculine expression, as in an illustration for the French translation of Dialogues des Courtisanes by Lukian of Samosata in 1930 . Her style was often described by critics as "perverse" and compared with the works of Tamara de Lempicka and other painters who did not dare to meet the public expectations of female decorum . By Joseph Delteil the statement Lydis comes "male with her breasts", and was based on their ability to represent sexual desire of a bisexual perspective. His metaphor plays directly with the patriarchal tradition of the nude woman as the site of heterosexual male fantasies by turning Lydis, like her model, into an object of male voyeurism (a woman who paints other women with her breasts). The professional painter Lydis presented me with her portrayal of lesbian and bisexual desire as a threat to certain parts of the Parisian art scene. Other people from the cultural scene spoke tolerantly of the problems associated with the perception of naked women by artists. In the monograph published in 1938, Henry de Montherlant comments on Lydis' interest in depicting prostitutes, lesbians, criminals and young girls with the words:

“Homosexuality, of course, does not consist of something pathological or alien (something tragic if society is sufficiently developed not to track it down). It was of some psychological importance that Mariette Lydis did not give all of her lesbians a neuropathic quality that undoubtedly corresponds to the preconceived notions of the man on the street, but not the reality. If Mariette Lydis had chosen the title Lesbian for her gouache from 1929, for example , in which two women lying at the foot of a tree are depicted ... that would have been both daring and healing: because it is always daring and healing against prejudice to face, to show the reality, to go against morals that are never criticized, and to rebel against the fundamental moral teaching. "

Lydis' works can be found in the following institutions, among others: Jewish Museum Vienna , Austrian National Library , Albertina , MAK (all Vienna), Museum of Fine Arts (Leipzig), British Museum (London), Bibliothèque nationale de France , Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume (both Paris), Uffizi (Florence), Manchester Art Gallery , Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Vancouver Art Gallery , the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University and the Museo Sívori (Buenos Aires).

Illustration of the book cover of Le Trefle a Quatre Feuilles: Ou La Clef Du Bonheur . Paris, 1935.

Memberships

Works (selection)

  • 1922: The mantle of dreams . Publishing house D. & R. Bischoff, Munich 1922.
  • 1924: 42 miniatures for the Koran . Brandus, Berlin 1924.
  • 1928: Le Petit Jésus . Editions du delta, Paris 1928 (French).
  • 1928: Lesbiennes . 1928 (French, portfolio ).
  • 1929: Edgar Allan Poe , Mariette Lydis (illustrations): Le Corbeau . Émile-Paul Frères, Paris 1929 (French).
  • 1930: Lukian von Samosata , Mariette Lydis (illustrations): Dialogues des Courtisanes . 1930 (French).
  • 1935: Le Trefle a Quatre Feuilles: Ou La Clef Du Bonheur . 1935 (French).
  • 1945: Pedro Miguel Obligado , Mariette Lydis (illustrations): Melancholía . Guillermo Kraft LTDA, Buenos Aires 1945 (Spanish).

literature

  • Christian Maryška: Mon travail est mon refuge . The painter and book illustrator Mariette Lydis - a stranger. In: The better half. Jewish artists until 1938 . Metroverlag, S. 183–189 (German, English, exhibition catalog).

Web links

Commons : Mariette Lydis  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Christian Maryška:  Lydis, Mariette . In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 . 2nd revised edition (online only).
  2. ↑ a b c The Cloak of Dreams . A Note on the Mysterious Illustrator Mariette Lydis. S.  58–62 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed March 24, 2019]).
  3. ↑ Thomas Mann : Essays II 1914-1926 . ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed March 23, 2019]).
  4. ↑ Mariette Lydis. In: honesterotica. Retrieved March 23, 2019 .
  5. ^ Paula J. Birnbaum: Women Artists in Interwar France: Framing Femininities . Ashgate Publishing Limited, Surrey, England 2011, ISBN 978-0-7546-6978-4 , pp. 208–211 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed March 24, 2019]).
  6. ↑ Mariette Lydis. In: Harvard Art Museums. Retrieved March 24, 2019 .
  7. ↑ Mariette Lydis. Una mirada interior. Museo Sívori, accessed March 24, 2019 (Spanish).
  8. ^ Paula J. Birnbaum: Women Artists in Interwar France: Framing Femininities . Ashgate Publishing Limited, Surrey, England 2011, ISBN 978-0-7546-6978-4 , pp. 237 (English).
personal data
SURNAME Lydis, Mariette
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lydis, Marietta; Pachhofer-Karny, Mariette (married name); Lydis-Govone, Mariette (married name); Ronsperger, Marietta (maiden name); Ronsperger, Maria Paula
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-Argentine painter, draftsman, illustrator and graphic artist
DATE OF BIRTH August 24, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH to bathe
DATE OF DEATH April 26, 1970
Place of death Buenos Aires