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Marie Egner, Self-Portrait, 1878
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I had a part-time job for a couple of years typing
correspondence and financial reports for a money management firm in midtown
whose clients included some well-known figures in the entertainment industry. Like all the part-time jobs I was able to
land over the years, it enabled me to preserve my professional standing as a
world-class starving artist.
Working only 15 to 20 hours a week, I was able to paint
mornings in my west/northwest-facing home studio, when the daylight is the most
consistent, and sketch the figure at the nearby Art Students League in the late
afternoon life drawing class, which is free for members.
The job was pretty painless and sometimes enjoyable. I remember listening to my boss, the firm’s
lead lawyer, counseling in a friendly, fatherly tone a tall, beautiful, 18-year-old fashion model, newly arrived from South
Africa and with money to burn. He urged her to economize by taking the
subway instead of taxis to and from assignments. Very good advice, I thought to myself.
I don’t like to name drop, of course, but the clients
included a performer who made a fortune singing a beer commercial, a famous
magician duo, a writer who created an infamous fictional serial killer, and
assorted heirs to show business fortunes.
Money has never interested me much, so I paid little attention to their
assets when I typed their financial reports.
So why is this little part-time job of mine, working for a
firm that epitomizes the pursuit of mammon, insinuating itself into this ostensibly
art-related blog? Well, it’s because it
led in April of 1986 to my discovery of the greatest story of all the great
stories I’ve eagerly devoured about painters living the artist’s life with all the
breath that’s in them.
The Austrian Institute was just around the corner from my
employer’s offices, and I stopped by around noontime one day to view an exhibit
of paintings created by an artist I had never heard of before, an Austrian Impressionist named Marie Egner (1850-1940).
Marie Egner was a terrific painter -- a single
woman who courageously traversed the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 19th
Century, producing landscapes in watercolor, gouache and oils with equal
facility. On many of her painting
excursions she was accompanied by one or more of her painting teachers and
compatriots. Later on in her career, she
specialized in creating lush floral still lifes, which were a particular hit
with collectors, including Austrian royalty.
Here’s some biographical information about Ms. Egner from an
Internet website. If you are like me, it
lists a lot of painters you’ve probably never heard of before. The 19th Century was loaded with real
painters, not part-time typists:
From 1867 to 1872, Marie Egner was a disciple of Hermann von
Königsbrunn in Graz. From 1872 to 1874, Carl Jungheim was her
teacher at the Academy of Düsseldorf.
There she met Hugo Darnaut who was to become a life-long friend. In 1881 she
was admitted to the circle of painters around Emil-Jakob Schindler, who was her
teacher until 1888. Together with Schindler's disciples Carl Moll and Olga
Wisinger-Florian, Egner stayed several summers at Schindler's property Schloss
Plankenberg. The artists worked together in a very intensive and fruitful way.
Schindler plays an important part in the woman's artistic as well as private
life.
In 1882, her painting "Lombardische Dorfstraße"
was shown in the Vienna Künstlerhaus. She also exhibited at the Royal
Academy in London
(1888), at the Berliner Kunstausstellung (1898) and at the world exposition in Paris
(1900). From 1887 on she was in charge of a painting school in England.
She was a member of the Austrian Association of Women Artists. http://www.austrian-paintings.at/marie-egner-en/
What struck me the most about this wonderful painter,
though, was not her artwork, good as it is, but the fact that this outwardly
reserved woman jotted down her deepest and most passionate thoughts about art,
music and politics in notebook diaries she secretly kept for 70 years, ending
in indecipherable scribbles when she was nearly blind only a couple of years before
her death at the age of 90.
When I started studying painting on a serious level –
already in my 30s, I got hit pretty hard by the sense that this was what I should
have been doing with my life all along.
I jotted down a few ardent observations about my new life in a little memo
pad for about two months, and that was the end of that. What Ms. Egner managed to do for so many
years is simply incredible.
She eloquently expressed her deepest feelings in the
unfettered privacy of a secret garden that she needed to cultivate all by herself and on her own terms. I know from my own dreamy life experience that
Ms. Egner’s notebook diaries satisfied so completely that basic human desire to
be honest and true in the only place that really matters ultimately – our own cloistered
minds. As someone whose public
pronouncements are ill-formed and completely ignored by those around me, I can
so easily identify with the Emily Dickinsons and the Marie Egners of the world.
In a booklet prepared for that Austrian Institute exhibit, Martin
Suppan, author of the artist’s monograph, notes that Ms. Egner refers in one of her
diaries to her teacher von Konigsbrunn as an “antiquated dusty relic,” who
turned her into a “nature fanatic.” She
calls Carl Jungheim “Charley” and writes that she does not want to become a “Charley-like-working-machine.” As for
Schindler, she was very attracted to him for his “imagination, playfulness –
balancing above the abyss” and for his “drastic poetic talent.” She credits
Schindler’s praise and criticism with providing the “passionate stimulus”
lacking thus far in her work. In London
she meets the Glasgow-born watercolorist Robert Weir Allan, who influenced her
to change from her “petty Viennese way of coloring to a lively, smooth
technique.”
Martin Suppan writes that Ms. Egner “knows very well to tell
the difference between creative expression and stylish fashion.” She severely criticizes one of her young
colleagues who “showed me her studies and this very talented girl also makes
this nonsense with red specks and green, red-yellow-trimmed trees. She claims to see it that way – she should
really see her ophthalmologist – it is never true – nothing but affectation and
sensationalism.”
Ms. Egner begins her last legible diary entry, at the age
of 87, with the words, “Whence, whither, wherefore…should be written on
tombstones.” Mr. Suppan observes, “These
last questions were posed before her final blindness. Soon afterwards, her writing becomes illegible;
the lines are running into each other.”
In one of her late diary entries, Ms. Egner crafted the most
heartfelt affirmation I have ever come across for why the greatest and the
least of us still bother to continue painting from nature in this digital age.
After viewing her works in a Viennese exhibit
in 1935, Marie Egner, 85 years old, plagued with cataracts and sometimes in
despair, wrote: “When I worked on these
paintings I really lived and was happy, sometimes high up in the skies like
lovers, sometimes mortally grieved. I
happened to live through plenty, indeed plenty of genuine things in my life.”
Although many of us are forced to temporarily sling hash, usher for theaters and concert halls, drive taxis, bartend, work in construction or type financial
reports, we understand you very well, Ms. Egner, we’ve been there ourselves on the same roller coaster ride for
a few glorious, fleeting moments.
