through the reverse-glass

Marguerite from Belgium lowers her voice when I ask about her Summer Academy 2014 experience.

 

"Everyone was quite alone. You see: I was alone here." - she points to her painting space.

 

"And the others were alone over there. There was a little lack of interaction."

 

Marguerite de Limburg Stirum is in her 82nd year and she remembers the other times at the Salzburg Summer Academy (1959, 1971, 1991, 2010) more convivially in comparison.

 

"We had so much fun with Oskar Kokoschka."

 

(Oskar Kokoschka second from left, Marguerite de Limburg Stirum third from left)

Foto © Erich Lessing 1959

 

As a teacher Kokoschka never said something about the weaknesses of a drawing or painting, he only talked about the things that were done well, Marguerite remembers.

 

"'That's good!' - Kokoschka would said. Thus everyone developed his or her own style."

 

Kokoschka and his students would often go out for dinner together. At the dinner table Kokoschka would praise the students who had done well that day, rewarding them with pieces of candy.

 

"When I received my candy I asked Kokoschka to sign the candy papers and he wrote 'O.K.' on all of them."

 

 

Being a Belgian aristocrat with an ancestral line that dates back almost a thousand years to Walram I Udo Graaf van Limburg (1040 - 1081) Marguerite escaped from her overly strict mother at the age of 18 and went to Rome where she survived almost completely without money for three months.

 

Marguerite later earned her living doing portraits of people in cafés in Italy, Spain or the United States.

 

"I discovered the work of Max Ernst in New York. I visited him every day in his studio and observed carefully how he did his paintings. I tried to be Max Ernst myself. One day he came to visit me in my small studio. Max Ernst looked at my paintings and said 'Marguerite! You found all of my tricks!'

 

Today Marguerite de Limburg Stirum is a Master of reverse-glass painting living in Belgium near Waterloo. I was not very aware of this technique where paint is applied on one side of the glass and the image is viewed through the glass from the other side. See Marguerite's work on her →website.

 

Upon the conclusion of the course we are having a coffee and a strudel with the artist Ellen Harvey and her son. Marguerite has a gift for them: a portrait of the boy sitting at his computer. They will take the present with them to New York.