Wwe see their time is up. She doesn’t see it. The old woman’s eyes are not on the hourglass that gives the title to Maria Lassnig’s 2001 painting. The old woman doesn’t look at us either. Her gaze goes into the distance, and her mouth is just as wide open as her eyes. This might be a pitiable sign of aging, an indication of the need for care. Control over the body’s motor skills dwindles over time, the involuntary takes over. Maria Lassnig was 82 years old when she painted this self-portrait.
But the synchronous opening of the three openings of the head – on closer inspection, the nostrils are also noticeable; the face is slightly below – read casually as a conventional sign of a break in self-control. The woman is amazed, she sees something wonderful, great or at least big. Should it be her reflection, although it would have to be familiar to her as we know Maria Lassnig’s facial features from almost every one of her pictures? She holds the hourglass in her left hand, shows it – and then has no eyes for the tool. In any case, there can be no question that she is not in control of her body. The half-length portrait gives the impression of great tension, precisely the lack of concentration allows energy to burst forth.
Bared in direct colourfulness
That the watch has done its job, that the cycle is complete and that all the sand is now forming a heap in the lower glass case, we probably only see at the second, probably even the third, glance. Because the sand is pink. This is the basic tone in the spectrum of flesh colors and is therefore anything but conspicuous in a nude, although only narrow strips of bare flesh are actually executed in this color, the illuminated edge of the index finger and small light reflex zones around the nose and eyes. The funnel, the upper half of the apparatus, is empty and the glass is transparent, which means invisible here. Behind it lies any section of the flesh landscape, which is dominated by orange and yellow, exposed in direct color with almost no preceding effect of refraction.
In the oeuvre of Maria Lassnig there is a large group of self-portraits with attributes. Of all the accessories from the iconographic fundus, the hourglass is certainly the thing that is easiest to understand. The person portrayed as the bearer of the symbol appears to be an allegorical figure with skin and hair – or without hair, because Maria Lassnig left it out, as in many pictures. The plucked condition here increases the suggestion that their appearance is completely absorbed in the meaningfulness. She embodies the transience of the physical: the screen-filling bone woman makes the grim reaper unemployed and performs a dance of death as a solo number.
Constructivist vertigo: Maria Lassnig painted the “body shell” as early as 1951.
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Image: Maria Lassnig Foundation / VG Bild-Kunst, 2022
In truth, however, the traditional meaning of the signs is invalid. The steady flow of grains as the epitome of the indifferent passage of time is suspended by the hourglass wearer showing indifference to her attribute. The work of art cannot stop time, but it can stop it.
With intentional negligence, i.e. abstract
The viewer is tempted to refrain from the object mentioned in the title because the painter depicts it with deliberate negligence: abstract, reduced to lines, as a rectangle that is filled in by a cross. This schematism of the simplest child’s drawing contrasts with the drastic realistic means with which the old woman presents herself. Bright colours, strong contours and coarse brushstrokes act as ciphers of vitality. And yet the title “The Hourglass” is not misleading. The motley female body is constructed, and the scheme of the crossed diagonals served as a model: both the mounting of the head on the shoulders and the physiognomy with its contrast of yellow and red zones repeat the basic form of the hourglass defined by tapering in the center.