![MANINA, Sognando Germinante [Dreaming of Germinante], 1971](https://static-assets.artlogic.net/w_500,h_500,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto/artlogicstorage/richardsaltoun/images/view/d08f3efb4f7c139feb40961cb7f707d2j/richardsaltoun-manina-sognando-germinante-dreaming-of-germinante-1971.jpg)
Sognando Germinante [Dreaming of Germinante], 1971
Born in Vienna in 1918, Surrealist artist Manina (a self-invented name, meaning ‘little hand’ in Italian) grew up amid the vibrant artistic milieu of pre-War Paris. The daughter of Expressionist painter Viktor Tischler and an operatic soprano mother, at 18 she became a muse for Dadaist photographer Erwin Blumenfeld, immortalised in many works including the iconic Manina / L’âme du torse (1934).
Facing rising antisemitism in France, in 1938 Manina fled to Los Angeles with her husband, the screenwriter Robert Thoeren, where she remained for the next decade. She began to draw in the late 1940s, following a move to New York, creating ink and pastel works exquisitely rendered with detailed line. Psychological in focus and uncanny in effect, as if guided, she later reflected, ‘by some outside power’, they depict solitary women, animistic ‘trees of life’ and hallucinatory structures on scales alternately diminutive and vast. Gaining early recognition for her dream-like visions, Manina soon exhibited at New York’s Hugo Gallery in 1951 alongside René Magritte, and subsequently at Jean Cocteau’s ‘Galleria Cocteau’ at the Jardin du Palais Royal in Paris, the following year.
Returning to post-War Europe in 1952, first to London, then Paris, Manina settled in Venice where she lived for the rest of her life. Soon after returning, she met her second husband, the French Surrealist poet Alain Jouffroy, with whom she published Les quatre saisons d’une âme (1955) featuring her drawings and his poems, written in spontaneous response. Her connection with Surrealism was furthered with an exhibition at Galerie Fürstenberg in Paris (1957), introduced through André Breton – who declared her works ‘pure poetry’ – and by her inclusion in the Exposition International du Surrealism in Paris in 1959.
Manina’s first painting, Incertain (1957) marked the beginning of an exploration into symbolic form and tonal scale in large-scale canvases for the next three decades. Soon after, she painted Vol de lupté (1958), a surreal landscape with crescent moon, mythic bird and isometric forms, made in homage to her friend Max Ernst. Following the tragic and violent death of her daughter in 1960, her works took on even greater spiritual resonance, consolidating the ‘feminine’ associated motifs of eggs, shells and suns with serpents, eyes and mask-like faces into a mature, pictorial cosmology. Increasingly free in their formal arrangement, the works from the 1970s and 80s delve further into the realms of the imaginary. Painting, for the artist, had become a transmutation of the self in which, she noted, there was ‘a kind of falling-into-a-trance, into a state unfettered by time or space’.
In 1975 Manina co-founded Group AZ, Italy’s sole Surrealist association. Existing for only a few years, their first exhibition was organised around the theme of death – a central concern of her painting. Responding to the ‘magico-poetic’ quality of Manina’s painting, in 1986 Arturo Schwarz selected her for the exhibition Arte e Alchimia at the 42nd Venice Biennial, her second participation following the first in 1964. Continuing to work until late in her life, Manina died in Venice in 2010.
Marianne Tischler (Manina) was born in 1918 in Vienna and died in 2010 in Venice. She was included in the 32nd Venice Biennial in 1964 and the 42nd Venice Biennial in 1986. Her work has been exhibited at Palazzo Reale, Milan (1989); Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice (1962; 1956; 1955); Exposition International du Surrealism, Galleria Cordier, Paris (1959); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1958); Galerie Fürstenberg, Paris (1957); Galleria Cocteau – Jardin du Palais Royal, Paris (1952) and Hugo Gallery, New York (1951; 1952).