Wicked but virtuous: My life

by Mirka Mora

No conventional autobiography, Wicked But Virtuous is a delightfully eccentric account of a life lived to the utmost. It celebrates the highs and lows of Mirka's bohemian existence, her lover, work, family.

Genres: Art, Biography, Nonfiction, Memoir, Australia, Autobiography

330 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2000

About the author

Mirka Mora, nee Madeleine Zelik, is a prominent French-born Australian Visual artist who has contributed significantly to the development of Contemporary Art in Australia. Her mediums include painting, sculpture and mosaics.
She was awarded Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2002.

Reviews

[Sarah Low · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mirka has written her autobiography in tumultuous fashion, a rambling dialogue of her childhood, her family, her loves and desires but most importantly of all her art. She admires and respects her fellow artists and writers and the book lists every writer she has ever read! So many years of a full life shared with luminaries including Gough Whitlam Sunday Reed, Charles Blackman, Marcel Marceau even Edith Piaf . She admires surgeons and street artists and befriends small children . Fascinating and confusing and full of warmth, cats and art art and more art.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

a book that is hard to put down Mirka goes from escaping the Nazis to moving to Melbourne in the 1950s and living an incredible artist’s bohemian lifestyle. Such an amazing life. I loved this book!

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird, wonderful and free form just like her. Recommend if you want dive into the history of modern art in Australia as well Mirka's brain! It's an experience.

[Sarah Low · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mirka has written her autobiography in tumultuous fashion, a rambling dialogue of her childhood, her family, her loves and desires but most importantly if all her art. She admires and respects her fellow artists and writers and the book lists every winter she has ever read! So many years of a full life shared with luminaries including Gough Whitlam Sunday Reed. Charles Blackman, Maurice Chevalier, Marcel Marceau, Edith Piaf . She admires surgeons and street artists and befriends small children . Fascinating and confusing and full of warmth, cats and art art and more art.

[Sherry Mackay · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kinda incomprehensible. It’s mostly stream of consciousness and not in a good way:(. A damn good editor would not have gone astray here. Unless you know all the artists and places and events she’s talking about it doesn’t mean a lot. And frankly life is too short to have to look up every second word.

[Liz N · Rating 1 out of 5]

By and large un-readable. Hers was an interesting, full and rich life but her eye-witness account of it strips if of any colour, humour and intellectual heft. There is a language barrier which does not serve comprehension or legibility but there is also an innate inability to tell a story, perhaps because her talent was visual art.

[Rob Lloyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Now that the time of death approaches, I roam through the universe as a little bit of dust looking to plant myself in a star and grow again one day somewhere."

R.I.P. Mirka Mora 1928-2018

[Sue Dale · Rating 3 out of 5]

A crazy & wonderful read - definitely a reflection of Mirka & her bohemian life.

[Magpie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Saffron 2020

[Siena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it!

[Hayley McManus · Rating 4 out of 5]

A true artist wrote this book. Mirka Mora's memoir is a tale on a winding road that had me intrigued right till the end. Her eye for beauty was genuine and it was lovely to see through her eyes.

[Jade O'Donohue · Rating 2 out of 5]

“How much time have I left? And how many more books will I read before my eyes go boom-boom? Will there be no wars and bad despots? Will we turn into good human beings or will we turn into machines?”

[Zoe · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was wild and strange - I'm not sure I necessarily liked it all the time, but I felt very moved by her unique view of the world and loved the joy she had in utterly disregarding every single basic trope of memoirs (really all books). I still don't have a grasp on the timeline of her life (when were her children born? when exactly did she separate from her husband again? how did she even start painting??), with the exception of her experiences during WW2, but those details weren't really the point - she seemed to want to give you the essence of Mirka more than anything else.

She wanders around wherever she wants to go - she tells you what book she was or is reading (including details of how and when she bought her books), what she thinks about her various dolls (including details about where and how she bought them), the adventures of her cat, and lots and lots about sex (the number of times she described various 'fascinum' was incredible). She gossips about her friends, neighbours and kids, about various famous people, she tells wild anecdotes, and interspersed among it all are strange philosophical insights, sometimes in French, and always unexpected. She even includes naked photos of herself in her own memoir - what a flex!!

While I don't know that I loved the act of reading it, fragmented and stream-of-consciousness as it was, everything was infused with this infectious joy of living and unique perspective on her having lived such a full and exciting life and looking back at it all in her 70s surrounded by her grandkids and running up to a retrospective. It definitely sticks in the brain - what an impressive and wild woman.

[Lisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was expecting to enjoy this book because I like Mirka Mora’s free-spirited art works, but it was a disappointment. I found it difficult to follow her train of thought in these chaotic ramblings…
The constant name-dropping really irritated me. Of course a notable painter like Mora is going to know many notable people, but there are 10 pages of famous names in the index!
Most of the time there’s seems to be no relevance in mentioning these people, but that may be partly because of the erratic way that Mora has put this book together. She explains (on p190) that her first efforts at writing her autobiography consisted in copying parts of her diary, and that is exactly what most of it looks like. She says elsewhere that her editor was concerned about her not meeting the deadline and I suspect that if time was tight, he/she decided to try and make a virtue of the muddle and hope that those interested in the book would consider it ‘artistic’. (Mora herself alludes to Proust, hinting that she is writing in a sort of stream of consciousness as Proust did, but having read Proust myself, I can’t agree….)
(Would Proust have written four lines about being molested on a train, followed by a line about wearing a little black Parisian suit? (p78). I think not).

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2008/10/19/wi...

[Janine · Rating 2 out of 5]

The artist and matriarch of a clutch of artistic Mora sons, Mirka Mora is a Melbourne institution. Earthy, twinkly and eccentric, she often pops up on documentaries to provide a bit of a shock when such naughtiness and carnality slips from the lips of a woman well into her eighties. Her autobiography, narrated in the same tangled-syntax and lightly-accented giggle that bubbles out of her interviews, is roughly chronologically ordered under a number of themes: My Paris, My Melbourne, My Restaurants, My Work, My Men, My Children, My Workshops etc. As she tells us at various times in the book, she is not particularly comfortable with the idea of writing an autobiography. .... The book is a succession of ‘names’ and slyly-told anecdotes and I found the constant name-dropping rather tedious. So too the exhaustive and rather obscure lists of books she had read and which, to be frank, I don’t really see reflected in her work. ....On finishing the book, while rather fond of this small, puckish character, I felt underwhelmed and almost cheated by her autobiography.
For my full review see:
https://residentjudge.wordpress.com/2...

[Beth Koorey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Received a parcel with a v. good hardback 1st ed. of Mora's memoir from an impromptu eBay purchase . Have a Melbourne trip with 2 gentlemen from Verona(or is that Erskineville)at the end of the week -want to finally seek out that rest. with walls painted by Mora. She's a force of nature.

[Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very warm and open autobiography. There were many emotions played out in her writing and many moments that made me want to know more about Mirka Mora and also myself.

[Dianepearse]

A bit rambling at times but always fascinating. Such a huge figure in Melbourne's arts scene, her life was something that could not be made up as fiction.