Maria Lassnig, Artist (Sept. 8, 1919 - May 6, 2014)

Maria Lassnig was an Austrian artist known for her painted self-portraits and her theory of "body awareness". She was the first female artist to win the Grand Austrian State Prize in 1988 and was awarded the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art in 2005. Lassnig lived and taught in Vienna from 1980 until her death.
In one self-portrait, she stares at you with an expression of scalding horror, but it's not her eyes that draw your gaze.  What demands immediate attention is the black gun pointed straight at you. There is a gun in her other hand, directed at her own brain.  Painted in her eighties, the title of the painting is "You or Me."  Her body, with the small flap of belly, the wilting breasts, the dead-chicken skin of her thighs,
               radiates self-loathing. 
           
              Lassnig studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna during the Nazi
              years, when the instruction was strictly classical and the walls were brown,
              stripped of degenerate modernists' vivid hues.  She internalized the
              brown.  She moved to America, but no one liked her art.   She returned to
              Vienna where she became the first female professor of painting in a
              German speaking country. 

              Lassnig often described her art as emerging from "body-awareness," a
              disciplined hypersensitivity to the workings of her internal organs  she    paints pain, thought, blood and breath as if they were objects she cold hold and scrutinize.