Could visual artist Lizzy Ansingh become a Piet Mondriaan?

In the photo Group portrait in the studio of Simon Maris From 1901 is the front left Piet Mondriaan. Besides him five women, they are all visual artist and they have an exhibition at the Amsterdam artists’ association Sint Lucas. Lizzy Ansingh (1875-1959) is the second from the right. In 1955 she wrote about Piet Mondriaan to one of her friends, Adriaan Roland Holst: “He was an academy woman, walked with us. (…) I found him a blurred head, not a great talent. (…) He had to explain so much and talk to his paintings.”

Lizzy Ansingh painted very differently than Piet Mondriaan, you can see at the exhibition The magical world of Lizzy Ansingh, Wherever the photo hangs. Lifelike portraits commissioned, illustrations for (children’s) books. Here and there you can read a poem or a verse, she made it too. And especially there are paintings of dolls, which she became familiar with in her time. Dolls like people are, you see when you stand in front of it. In which not the expression on their faces evokes a feeling – dolls have a harsh facial – but what they experience in the painting: often something sweet or funny, sometimes it is poetic or melancholic.

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The Magical World of Lizzy Ansingh is a modest exhibition in Luther Museum in Amsterdam. That location is logical: Lizzy Ansingh was the grandchild of portrait painter Johann Georg Schwartze, ancestor of the Lutheran artists’ family who occupies a prominent position in the museum. Johann Georg’s daughter Thérèse Schwartze also painted, she is the most famous descendant of the family. Thérèses sister Georgine was a sculptor. And Lizzy Ansingh’s sister, Thérèse Peizel-Osingh, also painted. The museum does own a few works of all members of the family.

Letter to Roland Holst

Piet Mondriaan and Lizzy Ansingh were simultaneously at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, hence the ‘academy woman’ in the letter to Roland Holst. Could Lizzy Ansingh have become a Mondrian?

In any case, it was exceptional that she followed that training. Lizzy Ansingh belonged to the first class women who were admitted, they were in a special women’s class. Ladies of good stand were (those were the male students too), they often already knew each other from the circles in which they were. And although they developed her own style, what they made was related: late impressionist, in classic genres such as still lifes, interiors, portraits.

‘Amsterdam Joffers’, art critic Albert Plasschaert called them in the magazine in 1912 Our art. It was intended as a compliment: “In their work and attitude you recognize the severity of a generation that has not claimed her place, but painted,” it was stated. However, when the styles and modes of the Avant-Garde came up-in which they did not go-the same Geuzename got a negative connotation. Their work was referred to as sweet and sweet, feminine, traditional.

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Lizzy Ansingh was successful with her paintings, especially in the beginning. She received prizes, was exhibited. Already in 1899, she was 24, the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam showed a work of hers, a portrait that she had painted from her mother that year. In 1912, the enchanting hung in the same museum Dolls dancing (the princesses)it can now be seen in The magical world of Lizzy Ansingh.

De Stijl and Cobra

But her work could not compete with movements such as De Stijl and later Cobra. She did not adjust herself, continued on the chosen path. At the exhibition you see various moving, especially quirky paintings of dolls. “A mirror of human comedy,” the compilers of the exhibition call those doll paintings.

That was also the case in her own time Albert Plasschaert, he wrote The green. “A painted biography,” he saw in her paintings: “Confessions of what happened to her, which in her until that moment lived stillekens, or of what was visited by her by the outside world.” Lizzy Ansingh responded by letter: “I was very surprised about your criticism of the dolls, because I am not just that someone sees something else in it than a still life, nice in color, so when I read what you wrote I thought: how does he know me like that?”

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And traditional paintings or not, it is also certain that Lizzy Ansingh (and more female artists from her time) never married, so she didn’t have to give up her art. And with her portraits to order, she provided for her livelihood. She was an independent woman who knew she had been out of time. But she also had her own view on that. In a letter from 1947: “I was able to find out again in some rip productions and invitation cards for exhibitions that the art has become somewhat child.”

The poem Than she wrote in 1959, the year of her death. It hangs in the room:

Then they will come in gently and stand around me

bend to me, more or less stripped –

Listening and whispering, I will not understand them:

Because I am in bustling branding

van den Infinite Ocean …

Then there will be a small tumult

As in the garden where the cat has just reached a bird.

Short. Then there is to that bird

No more

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