Maria Sax Ledger; Artist 'discovered' at 60
Hyfler/Rosner
English an impenetrably cold race. In compensation she
idealised every aspect of her childhood and talked every day
about her father and her "homeland". Switzerland became a
lost domain where the snow fell thickly, where children
skated till midnight on ponds deep in the woods, where
lovers fell into fast-flowing rivers, grasping haplessly at
clumps of blue flowers and were swept away crying, "Vergiss
mich nicht!" This obsessive "Heimweh" translated into her
paintings. They were landscapes of the imagination,
invariably dominated by an orange sun, ranged left. A
sequence of paintings documented the folk life of old
Helvetia - its village funerals and weddings and its
unforgiving and often eerie tales and legends."
The Independent
by Tanya Harrod
11 April 2006
Maria Martha Sax, artist: born Zurich 12 July 1916; married
1937 Neville Hallam (two sons; marriage dissolved), 1950
Peter Ledger (died 2003; two daughters); died Dolgellau,
Gwynnedd 26 March 2006.
The career of Maria Sax Ledger embodied many of the problems
faced by women artists in the 20th century. Until the age of
60, she worked without any contact with the official
institutions of art. None the less she painted every day
and, significantly, never exhibited with amateur groups.
Until the late 1970s she gave her paintings away to friends
and relations.
She was "discovered" at the age of 60 when the painter John
Henshaw organised a solo show at Warminster Art Centre. Over
the next 20 years she exhibited frequently in North Wales,
mainly at Coleg Harlech and at Oriel Plas Glyn-y-Weddw,
Llanbedrog, her professional career culminating in 1996 with
a Welsh Arts Council retrospective organised by Susan Daniel
(now director of Tate St Ives) at Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno.
Although self-taught, Sax Ledger could hardly be described
as a naļve painter. She was no Grandma Moses; her models
were the best early modernists. A powerful poetic colourist,
she was strongly influenced by Van Gogh and by German
Expressionists like Nolde and Schmidt-Rottluff and artists
working in Switzerland such as Chagall, Ferdinand Hodler and
Giovanni Segantini.
She was essentially a painter, but she paid little attention
to the hierarchies of art. She embroidered in an anarchic
fashion and put enormous energy into the interiors of her
houses and the design of her clothes. In her later years,
with the collaboration of her doughty dressmaker, "Marlene"
of Penrhyndeudreth, her appearance became a vivid extension
of her art.
Her childhood was troubled, caught between Bohemianism and
the harsh strictures of bourgeois Swiss society. She was
born Maria Sax in Zurich in 1916 and educated at Chāteau de
Montmirail, Neuchātel, and at Institut Minerva, an élite
boy's school in Zurich at which she was the only girl. Her
flamboyant father, Karl Sax, the director of an insurance
firm, was also a poet, novelist and essayist. He was seen by
her as a "genius", unmatched by any other man, and he made
her aware of the rich intellectual and political life in
Zurich in the 1920s.
Although Zurich was her playground she also spent memorable
summers climbing and hiking at a summer camp at Mollis in
Canton Glarus. As a teenager she spent long hours in the
Zurich Kunsthaus and studied the paintings owned by her
father's friend Oskar Reinhardt. She briefly attended Zurich
University. Her apparently idyllic life was cut short by her
father's suicide in 1935.
Rebelling against her autocratic brothers, she impulsively
ran away to England and found herself incompetently baking
cakes in the basement of a Surrey teashop. In 1937 she
married Neville Hallam, an eccentric medical practitioner
almost twice her age. Homesick, she began to paint on the
wooden furniture in the kitchen, ostensibly to cheer up her
cook.
By 1950 she was married to Peter Ledger and living in one of
England's few Modern Movement houses, near the North Downs.
There she began to paint in earnest, on canvases but also on
doors, round door-frames and on windows. Her activities
certainly tempered the austerities of Ernst Freud's
functionalist architecture. She was encouraged in her art by
a tiny network that included the Australian painter Bill
Veale, the Dutch artist and mineralogist Henk Huffener and
the Swiss dealer in African art Herbert Reiser.
As her choice of friends suggests, Sax Ledger found the
English an impenetrably cold race. In compensation she
idealised every aspect of her childhood and talked every day
about her father and her "homeland". Switzerland became a
lost domain where the snow fell thickly, where children
skated till midnight on ponds deep in the woods, where
lovers fell into fast-flowing rivers, grasping haplessly at
clumps of blue flowers and were swept away crying, "Vergiss
mich nicht!" This obsessive "Heimweh" translated into her
paintings. They were landscapes of the imagination,
invariably dominated by an orange sun, ranged left. A
sequence of paintings documented the folk life of old
Helvetia - its village funerals and weddings and its
unforgiving and often eerie tales and legends.
When she moved to North Wales in 1980, the remarkable
landscape of Ardudwy might have outfaced her imagination.
But she was never tied down by actuality or by the ambient
beauty of the Artro valley. In Wales, she created a large
studio that became her exclusive territory. As her work
passed from the world of the gift to the rather more bracing
world of the commodity she took on the mantle of celebrity
with delight and was frequently interviewed and filmed,
still a strikingly beautiful woman in old age, dispensing
intuitive and often eccentric insights to a circle of
youthful admirers.