Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (1906 - 1996)

Marie-Louise Motesiczky  1906-1996

Artist Marie-Louise  Motesiczky  was born in Vienna in 1906 and studied and practised painting.   She came to England with her mother Henriette  in  after the Anschluss in 1938 to escape persecution in Austria  but her brother Karl  remained and died in a concentration camp in 1943. Henriette came from a wealthy family that included many distinguished names from the social and intellectual life of Vienna, where Marie Louise’s grandmother was an early patient of Sigmund Freud.   Marie Louise  and her mother lived in Amersham in Bucks and she continued to paint and she had  first solo exhibition in 1943.  While in Amersham she met various other people who had had to escape the Nazis, including future Nobel prize winning author Elias Canetti (1905- 1994) and composer and pianist Francesco Ticciati (1893-1949).

After the War she and her mother moved to a flat in West Hampstead and became British subjects in 1948. Two solo exhibitions in 1952 were held in the Hague and Amsterdam and one  at the Beaux Arts gallery in London. In 1960  they moved to 6 Chesterford Gardens and after her death her archive was deposited at the Tate Gallery. Five of her paintings are now at Amersham Museum and some in the Freud Museum and a charitable trust has been established in her name.