Maria von Heider-Schweinitz: Bild und Selbstbild

To mark the start of the new exhibition program, the Kunst Archiv Darmstadt is showing selected works by the artist Maria von Heider-Schweinitz, who belongs to the second generation of Expressionists.

Johanna Maria Lina Gräfin von Schweinitz und Krain, Freiin von Kauder was born in Darmstadt on February 20, 1894. She moved to Berlin with her parents, where she spent her childhood and youth and received her first private art lessons at an early age. She lived with her family in Frankfurt am Main from 1918. She devoted herself to sculpture for a short time, but turned to painting from 1932 - encouraged by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, with whom she had a lifelong friendship. Her first oil paintings in an expressive style date back to 1934. She thus opted for Expressionism at a time when this style was officially discredited, which is why the artist largely worked in secret. Even in these years, she produced paintings, predominantly in oil on canvas, of sensual expressiveness: landscapes, figure paintings and still lifes. One focus of Heider-Schweinitz's work is on depictions of figures, especially women. What is striking here is the repetition of a certain type of woman across all phases of her work: these are not portraits in the true sense of the word, even if many of the women depicted resemble the painter herself.

After several personal strokes of fate, the artist withdrew more and more and died at the age of 80 on the night of December 5, 1974 in Frankfurt am Main.