Marie Bashkirtseffs Gemälde Im Nebel in der Sammlung des Wiener Belvedere. Eine Entdeckung (Curator's Choice, Nr. 6, 2023)

FRANZ SMOLA CURATOR‘S CHOICE 
# 6 / 2023 
1 
Marie B ash kirtseff s Gemälde 
Im Nebel in der Sammlung 
des Wie ner Belvedere. 
Eine E ntdeckung 
FRANZ 
SMOLA CURATOR’S 
CHOICE# 
6 
/ 2023

Abstract

Marie Bashkirtseff was born in 1858 in Ukraine; her parents were Russian aristocrats. In her youth her family moved to Paris, where Bashkirtseff studied at the private Académie Julian. While still studying, her portraits and everyday scenes, rendered in a style akin to Realism, attracted attention at the Paris Salon. From the age of fourteen, Marie Bashkirtseff kept a journal with entries that went well beyond the scope of comparable chronicles of the time. Her writings contained insights into life at the Académie and her sociocultural world, and she also articulated her dreams and desires in an unusually open and self-confident manner. One theme was her tuberculosis that ultimately caused the young woman’s premature death in 1884 at the age of only twenty-six. Marie Bashkirtseff left an oeuvre now estimated to comprise around 230 paintings and drawings. But she became widely known in the ensuing years not so much as a painter but rather as the author of her journal, which had been published by her family in 1887. These diaries, comprising multiple notebooks, were the subject of intense discussion in the literary world and were also translated into other languages. For feminist artists striving for more independence and recognition in the early twentieth century, Bashkirtseff’s writings virtually held cult status. This was probably one reason for the presentation of two of her works at the 1910 epochal exhibition Art of the Woman held at the Vienna Secession. One of these paintings, In the Fog, already close in style to Impressionism, was acquired by the Austrian Association of Women Artists and given, one year later, to the Modern Gallery, the future Austrian Gallery Belvedere.

Keywords:

Female artist – Marie Bashkirtseff – Feminism – Diarist – Paris – Impressionism – Realism – Tuberculosis

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