Elisabeth Lotte Franzos

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Madness and the artistic imagination By Neville Hawcock

No wonder Lotte Franzos didn’t like the portrait Oskar Kokoschka painted of her in 1909. Her skin is blotchy, her expression downcast; her skinny hands look awkward, with the middle and index fingers of the left drawn tensely back; the background has all the hues of a livid bruise. Although Franzos was a friend of the Viennese artist, she wrote to him to complain about the likeness. Her reaction was vindicated by the reception that critics gave the picture when it was exhibited in Vienna in 1911: “What a foul smell emanates from the picture of Frau Dr Franzos!” exclaimed one. But Frau Dr Franzos was at odds with the zeitgeist, or so Madness and Modernity, on show at the Wellcome Collection argues: many a wealthy, arty Viennese was only too happy to have a portrait painted in this anguished style. Kokoschka’s show included some 23 portraits of Viennese intellectuals, depicted, as a contemporary critic put it, “with all the signs of quiet or raving madness”. In the years leading up to the first world war, the Austro-Hungarian capital was a city of the highly strung, revelling in their own anxieties like miserablist teenagers. If 1900s Vienna, city of Klimt, Freud and Mahler, was the cradle of modernism, it was hardly a joyous birth.

http://www.oberlin.edu/amam/Kokoschka_Sposalizio.htm

11. Lotte Franzos (1881-1957) was born Elisabeth Lotte Rapp in Erfurt, Germany. Married to Emil Franzos, a lawyer, she maintained a salon in Vienna where artists, writers, and politicians gathered, and she supported young artists, such as Kokoschka, who painted her portrait in 1909. After her husband's death, she emigrated to Washington, D.C. Her bequest to the AMAM included several German paintings, drawings, and prints (including two of her own self-portraits from about 1912). See R. J. [Recha Jaszi], "The E. Lotte Franzos Bequest," Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin 15, no. 3 (Spring 1958), pp. 116-18, 127, ill. In an undated letter (in the museum files) Kokoschka wrote to Recha Jaszi in Oberlin: "She [Franzos] had meant a great deal in my life. And she remained loyal to my work, very different from many other people in my youth. I will always be grateful to her beyond death and especially that she left Sposalizio to the Oberlin museum. For evidence that Lotte Franzos owned the painting by 1916, see the letter from Oskar Kokoschka to Herwarth Walden, 21 February 1916, Vienna: "Frau Dr. Franzos...hat ein gutes Frauenbild [her portrait] und 'Sposalizio' und Zeichnungen" (Oskar Kokoschka Briefe, eds., Heinz Spielmann and Olda Kokoshka, vol. 1 [D%C3%BCsseldorf, 1986]), p. 234). - See more at: http://www.oberlin.edu/amam/Kokoschka_Sposalizio.htm#sthash.azdLIPS...