Film and painting: “She literally put herself on the screen”

What is special about Maria Lassnig’s art and what is your personal approach to it?

I have known Maria Lassnig’s pictures for a very long time and find them very inspiring. I like the inner expression of these works and their colors, which each combine something specific with. For example, there are colors of cancer fear, pain and agony. I always found the colors great in their brightness and expressiveness: the pink, the yellow, the purple, the turquoise!

In her diaries, Maria Lassnig dealt intensively with which feeling she could translate with which color. How does this work?

At cinema screenings in Austria, I did an exercise with the audience called “Pain Chair” – people had to assign a color to the feeling of their butt in the chair. Lassnig did that once too. She also wondered what happens at that boundary between the two, chair and butt, and what that feels like.

In her film, Birgit Minichmayr embodies Maria Lassnig at all ages, and there are certain age characteristics in each case: the glasses, the tiger fur coat or, in old age, her stooped posture. Why did you choose this type of ageless depiction?

I was looking for a cinematic translation of Maria Lassnig’s emotional state. The film is a soul portrait and a counterpart to what she says and feels. When she painted, she felt within herself and looked for the place where ideas lie. Ideas that you may not be able to remember afterwards, that you don’t know where they came from and for which it doesn’t matter where you are sitting or what day it is. She wanted to catch this moment every day. In a film scene, Maria Lassnig blurs the color and immerses herself in her images. She literally put herself on the canvas in her pictures.

Contemporary witnesses and documentary elements can also be seen in the film. How did you work with people from Maria Lassnig’s environment?

For this film I did a lot of research and interviewed a lot of people. I briefly considered making it a documentary because I spoke to so many great people who work in the art world, but then I stuck with the narrative form. Ultimately, I distilled parts of the interviews or content into scenes. Some of the actors are amateur actors, some also play themselves. Elfie Semotan, for example, was one of the people I interviewed. She told me about the photo shoot she once did with Maria Lassnig and which we staged for the film. Then I thought: Why should I let someone else play it and not her? Or Diethard Leopold, curator and son of the art collector Rudolf Leopold: He plays a museum director in the film because I always imagined him in a certain scene.

Johanna Orsini, who plays Lassnig’s sadistic mother, was in a Maria Lassnig film as a child; Maria Nicolini, the illiterate grandmother in the film, used to live in the house opposite Lassnig and also wrote about Maria Lassnig. She had no previous acting experience. These casts give the film another dimension.

For me, Maria Lassnig has something hermitical about her. Starting in 1980, she was completely isolated in her studio in Feistritz for four months every year. There are only two other houses next to her house, one was empty during Lassnig’s lifetime and she had a falling out with her immediate neighbor. The nearest village was three quarters of an hour away. I think she also enjoyed this seclusion. Although she was able to get along well with one person, several people were difficult for her. When I now confront the magnificently sensual and physically intense actress Birgit Minichmayr with amateur actors who always retain something normal, I reinforce this gap between this hermit painter and the “normal world”.

The film was shot in Lassnig’s original studio in Feistritz (Carinthia). What was your impression when you were there for the first time?

That was a very awesome moment. There is always something, shall we say, violent about the fact that the toothbrush is still there but the person is no longer there. The studio was as Maria Lassnig left it. It was originally an elementary school, so there were small children’s chairs and small tables that she also used, her brushes were lying around, her pickle jars and her turpentine were lying around and her clothes were still in a box. Her jogging shoes were in a locker, the soles of which were slowly crumbling. We only changed small things for the film, but we had to reconstruct the roof with visual effects. It had already been repaired because it was rotten.

In one scene, Maria Lassnig mentions that she would only want to teach at the academy if she was paid the same as Joseph Beuys. Another time she says to her partner Arnulf Rainer: “A woman has to work three times as hard as a man. Just because she is a woman.« For Maria Lassnig, the men’s world in art was certainly an issue.

Her life was determined by the struggle for recognition in the male art world. In the 1950s, for example, the central location of the Viennese scene was Otto Mauer’s gallery, where Lassnig’s colleagues Markus Prachensky, Josef Mik and Arnulf Rainer were very supported. Maria Lassnig, who is ten years older than her, is not. In a film scene, someone in the gallery says to her: “Yeah, you’re Rainer’s girlfriend.” When she finally got her first exhibition in the gallery, she had a beard drawn over her lips in a photo. Lassnig’s biography is the story of self-empowerment. I make no claim to any kind of completeness in the film and I don’t proceed chronologically.

Why did you name the film after the picture “Sleeping with a Tiger” by Maria Lassnig?

To me, “sleeping with a tiger” means that you are messing with something that is bigger than yourself. That you are fighting with the world. This can be an external world – she has messed with a lot of people – or an internal world in which she is fighting with herself. She did that too. Maybe she is the tiger herself.

“Sleeping with a Tiger”, Austria 2024. Director and screenplay: Anja Salomonowitz. With: Birgit Minichmayr, Oskar Haag, Johanna Orsini, Lukas Watzl. 107 min. Now in cinemas.