Colnaghi Elliott Master Drawings is delighted to announced that the J. Paul Getty Museum acquired the exceptional self-portrait in late pregancy of Secessionist artist Elena Luksch-Makowsky.
This self-portrait marks the beginning of the artist’s long and very personal confrontation with the relationship between identity as an artist and the role of motherhood. It is not just a fundamental work within Luksch- Makowsky’s career but also a very significant portrait within the context of the artist’s time and more generally art history, being an unusual self-portrait at full-term pregnancy.
Luksch-Makowsky was born in 1878 into a wealthy Saint Petersburg artist family and travelled with her family through Europe in her childhood, settling in Munich in 1989. She married the Viennese sculptor Richard Luksch in 1900. Luksch-Makowsky took was the only woman artist full included in Secession exhibitions in 1901, 1902, and 1903. Later, in 1911, the artist, now based in Hamburg, collaborated with the Wiener Werkstätte. An exhibition at the Belvedere museum in Vienna in 2020 reasserted the artist's importance in the Secessionist exhibitions and other movements of the early 20th century
