Learning about a cult artist—those underappreciated geniuses whose influence on a given art form are not yet widely recognized—is one of life’s great pleasures. I count among such moments the day, in 1984, when my then-girlfriend (now wife) showed me an obscure, out-of-print monograph she had bought, in the late seventies, in Edmonton, Alberta, of the German modernist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907). With her bold experiments in subject matter, color, modelling, and brushwork, Modersohn-Becker was among the painters, along with Picasso and Matisse, who created modernism in the first years of the twentieth century.
That an artist of such gifts was a virtual unknown in North America seemed the more amazing given the dramatic details of her short, tragic life. As a marketing-minded gallery owner of today might put it, she had quite a story: famous friends (among them the poet Rainer Maria Rilke); a turbulent personal life (her marriage to an older, respected artist, Otto Modersohn, went unconsummated for years, and she had an eyebrow-raising affair that ended badly); struggles against poverty (like Van Gogh, she could never make any money selling her work); and, finally, an early death, at thirty-one, weeks after giving birth to her first and only child.
Efforts at winning for Modersohn-Becker a posthumous American fame cannot be said to have failed, since such efforts were never undertaken. That is, until the publication, this year, of the book “Paula Modersohn-Becker: The First Modern Woman Artist,” by the art historian Diane Radycki. In her introduction, Radycki calls her book a “slightly unconventional monograph of a highly unconventional artist.” The book blends art-historical scholarship and visual analysis with dramatic biographical sketches drawn from the painter’s contemporaneous letters and journals—a “riveting sequence of first-person accounts,” as Radycki puts it, that “reveals the personal cost when one woman genius wants it all—a big career and motherhood—in an era before women had the vote.”
Part of Radycki’s subject is, necessarily, that of how an artist who died in obscurity has been resurrected for later generations—a facet of the story in which Radycki herself played no small part over almost four decades of fascination with the artist. Radycki performs some sharp detective work to suggest that Picasso’s knowledge of a 1906 Modersohn-Becker portrait played a crucial role in his solving the problem, later that same year, of how to paint the head in his seminal portrait of Gertrude Stein—just one piece of evidence that allows Radycki to call Modersohn-Becker’s story “the missing piece in the history of twentieth-century modernism.”
When I sat down recently with Radycki, on the Upper East Side in an apartment crammed with paintings by her late husband, Sidney Tillim, I started by asking how she first became aware of Modersohn-Becker.
Radycki: It started with an image in a college classroom, in the late sixties, at the University of Illinois in Chicago. It was a course in modern art taught by John McNee, a painter—because the art historians didn’t want to touch anything that was under fifty years old. McNee taught in a very painterly way. He’d been in Europe during the Second World War, posted in Germany, and he went to museums and took photographs. And he didn’t know German. We were studying early-twentieth-century German Expressionism, and I was dutifully taking notes and trying to get this all under my belt, and I thought I had all the definitions right, and they were all based on [the male Expressionist painters] Kirchner and Pechstein and Schmidt-Rottluff and a lot of these guys who were somewhat energetic and raw, then—poof!—on the screen comes this Modersohn-Becker. McNee said, “I don’t know how this fits, and I can’t tell you anything about it. I’m putting it here because the time is right; this is early twentieth century, this is German, and I found her in German museums. But I can’t tell you anything about this.”
What painting was it?
It’s the painting that stuns a lot of people. [“Self-Portrait with Amber Necklace” (1906)] If you know Kirchner’s “Self Portrait with Model,” you see how different they are. He’s naked, he’s smoking his pipe, he has his red-tipped paint brush, and here’s our little model in the back, absolutely ravished. A very male definition of Expressionism. Then McNee shows us this. [In the Modersohn-Becker self-portrait, she is not only naked but looks out with bold self-possession and a half smile at the viewer—hardly the “ravished” female model relegated to the background.] I’m thinking, How does this work? Something in the definitions for what is supposed to be an art movement don’t work for all the artists in this movement.
So it made a really big impression on me. I graduate, move to New York, and, over time, I decide to take an M.A. in art history at Hunter College at night. My thesis adviser was Gene Goossen, who basically put Ellsworth Kelly on the map. So I’m talking to Goossen, trying to figure out what to do for an M.A. And I remembered Modersohn-Becker, and what McNee said: “There’s nothing on her in English.” Every art historian knew who she was, but there was no literature on her. Goossen says to me, “There’s only one thing really of any note about her, and that is her letters and diaries.”
Those were the letters and diaries published in Europe in the twenties, after her death?
Yes. They made her before her paintings made her. She really comes on the scene—explodes on the scene, in Europe—in the twenties, and it is both her letters and her paintings, but the letters reach a far broader audience. Two-thirds of the letters are from the age of sixteen through the early years of her marriage, before she starts going back and forth to Paris, in 1903, 1905, 1906-07, so they are girlish—full of energy, mischief, willfulness. The paintings are for the avant-garde élite. She’s published by Kurt Wolff, who publishes Kafka.
Had they been translated into English?
No. I translated them into English. Subsequent people also translated her letters into English. The letters are how most people got to know her. They expected the paintings to be as sweet as the letters, but they found them to be edgier and didn’t exactly know what to do with that aspect of her. That’s where she always fell between the cracks.
She looked so much like the good girl—except, not really. She leaves her husband. She leaves her stepdaughter. She goes into that girl’s life when the girl was two years old, and when she leaves, five years later, that girl is seven. That’s her little girl. So you have to know that something was really troubling her for her to abscond [from the Worpswede artist colony in Germany, where she lived with her husband and stepdaughter, to Paris, where modernism was exploding]. She didn’t do it politely at all.
I was astounded to learn from your book that, until Modersohn-Becker, women did not paint nude self-portraits.
No. She’s the first. She really is the first. There are no nude portraits by Berthe Morisot, by Mary Cassatt, by anybody in modernism before her. The only nude of a woman artist was done by Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-c. 1656), so it’s thought, when she needed a female model for “Susanna and the Elders,” that she used her own body. But that’s something else.
Before Modersohn-Becker, there was no one. Women did not approach themselves that way. And then, it takes a while after her for that to become part of the modernist vocabulary, a new thinking about the participation of women in art, and their ideas about subject matter and, finally, their ideas about the body. We think it all happened in the seventies. It happens with her. And there’s no way to understand what she’s doing, given the language of art history at the time. The two dealers who present her, when they exhibit that first nude self-portrait, it was without a title. There was no way to say “Nude Self-Portrait.”
What’s most important is that it happens in 1906, 1907, the crucial years for modernism, when Picasso paints “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” Matisse paints “Blue Nude,” Derain paints “Three Bathers,” and all three of them are making statements about the modern. She’s there, actually, a bit before them—1906—doing this with the female body. She’s more than just one more female artist for people to consider. She’s there at the moment when modernism shapes itself.
How conscious was she of it? She does write in a letter, “I’m becoming something.”
She is absolutely aware. If I had another subtitle for this book, it would be about ambition. Because, for the most part, these artists—Morisot, Cassatt, Frida Kahlo, maybe—are incredibly ambitious, and nobody writes about that. When I say ambitious, she was measuring herself and she wanted to beat everybody out. She knew she had it in her. When she hit her stride with the nude, she declares it, “I’m doing it. I’m doing what nobody else has done, I’m seeing it, I’ve got it.”
She trained in the classic techniques of realism and naturalism, and she throws it away. Is she purposely abandoning all that classic technique she laboriously learned over many years?
I’m going to say yes, and I’m basing this on that one line that says, “You’ve got to know the technique, and master the technique, in order to be able to throw it away.” And perhaps the best known variant of that is Picasso saying, “When I was a child, I knew how to draw like an Old Master, and it has taken me a lifetime to learn how to draw like a child.” So it’s that: trained as a Master, then you let go of it to win your way back to some kind of authenticity and imagination, something untaught.
When does she get conscious of Picasso?
Certainly, she’s conscious of Picasso in 1906 when she’s there, in Paris. She’s there in 1900, 1903, 1905, 1906. I have a feeling that, in 1905, she’s conscious of something. Something is so irritating to her. That’s when she comes back [to Worpswede], and she’s just in despair and it has to explode for her to leave and go back to Paris. I tried to map the times when Picasso was there and she was there. But it’s not so much about when he was physically there—because they keep missing each other. It’s not knowing Picasso; it’s seeing that art work. It was here and there, in galleries that she mentions going to. So I believe that she was aware of him in ’05 and likely she met him in ’06. Or, more likely, he met her in ’06 and he saw what she was doing.
Well, it’s fascinating about the Gertrude Stein portrait and what you uncover there. I’d certainly read that he struggled for months with how to paint Stein’s head, and it doesn’t really fit the rest of the body.
The radiographs show that he turned it. It was in profile, and he keeps turning it, and he stops her exactly where Modersohn-Becker stops the Lee Hoetger portrait. It’s stunning. It made me shiver, because you realize that he saw something.
I’m wondering if he saw her. He could have—it’s perfect timing. The Gertrude Stein portrait had to have been on his mind. He’s going to Spain with it on his mind, unresolved. We all say: He went to Spain, had a vacation, got home, and it was resolved. I want to say: He went to Spain, he knew he had a problem, he came back, maybe he saw something that said … and then it was resolved. It’s very scary. Even I don’t have the nerve to go there. I want to be outrageous with this and say: You know, one day Rousseau brought him over to Modersohn-Becker’s studio because she was good friends with his good friend Hoetger, it’s a small little world, everyone’s living within blocks of each other…
The torment of not being in Paris where it’s all happening clearly builds up in her.
The time gets shorter between each visit. She’s saving pocket money. She’s saving what she gets from her husband. Women at that time don’t control their own money. And she’s planning. She’s already planning to leave Worpswede before she’s even returned.
Whether or not she’s there to see these things, Rilke is; there are plenty of networks of communication to know that it’s all happening in Paris. The Salon of 1905 is where Matisse did the “Green Stripe”—it was the announcement, in effect, of Fauvism. Everything is heating up, in ’05, with Matisse ahead. Picasso’s ambition is sharpening. It’s such a wild time to be there and she wants to be there.
I like what you write about the wonderful painting “Mother and Child Reclining” and her other paintings of the naked female body. You say: “There is no male precedent for what she’s doing, nor could there be. She painted the female body from within its immanent life, a radical spectacle of skin and pubic hair.”
That’s it.
She really belongs in a different category from the way men were painting the female nude.
She begins that category! She charts it!
The awkwardness of the pose of that mother and child. She could be strangling that baby.
You got it!
Men would sentimentalize it—
Yes.
Romanticize, sexualize, or all of the above.
A baby’s body is lumpy; it’s not this little angelic erotic putto.
Why did she decide to have a child? She was just coming into her own as an artist, not commercially but aesthetically. Did she want to, as we say today, “have it all”?
That’s the question. She’s educated to that ideal by her family and the time and what a woman is in that German world. She says she does want a baby. But she doesn’t. She goes to Worpswede, and one of the first diary entries is: “So and so is having a baby. I’m not ready for that yet.”
There’s no complaint that the marriage is unconsummated until she’s about thirty. People don’t like to talk about that guillotine that comes down when that last burst of hormone starts knocking through your body, and I think that took her out of her control. She uses the fact of the white marriage. She’s looking for reasons to leave in 1906 and, finally, what she’ll do is have an affair. And let me make clear how outlandish this affair is. They’ve gone to visit their friends the Hauptmans, this is going on in this house right under everyone’s nose. She talks to Clara [Westhoff, Rilke’s wife and Modersohn-Becker’s close friend] in letters, in Berlin, and she’s saying, “I’m going to leave my husband and have a child on my own.” Clara writes to Rilke and says, “Does she know what she’s talking about?” Then Clara says, “Maybe she just needs to say it and then go to Paris and maybe, once in Paris, that will reshape itself.” Sure enough, when she gets to Paris there’s no more talk of “The woman’s femaleness is manifested in bearing a child.” I say this because the fellow she has the affair with has very strong ideas about women and motherhood and the reason for a woman to be is to procreate. She chooses him to have the affair with. He’s a very well-known ladies man. He’s “affair-able.” She goes there. Clara even says, “She’s giving me reasons, they don’t sound like hers. They sound like some kind of program.”
When her husband comes back, then she gets pregnant. So you’ve got to think if those were the terms by which she would allow him to come back. So somehow it’s on her mind, there’s some pressure, either internalized or from the circle, for her to have children.
She had that self-imposed deadline of thirty to do something with her art, as she said. It’s right after thirty that she gets pregnant.
She delivers in November, 1907, at age thirty-one.
Makes you wonder how much all of it was subconscious.
And everything around her is telling her that a woman needs to have a child. Her best friend, Clara, has a child and a career and a major art-figure husband, and so there’s a lot of pressure.
Three weeks after the baby is born, she has this embolism that kills her. Was it a pulmonary embolism? Or brain?
She complained of pain in the legs, so they kept her in bed after the birth. [Pulmonary embolism is a blood clot that starts in the legs and travels to the heart and lungs. Immobilization of the legs greatly aggravates the syndrome.] Apparently, she didn’t get up for days. The doctor came, and they said, “O.K., you can get up.” She went into the other room, sat, asked for the baby, complained of pain in her leg, and wanted to put her leg up and then she died. All she said was, “What a pity.”
Did she have a sense of what she’d achieved?
It’s not recorded. There’s a letter to Rilke, she’s making plans—she never stopped making plans—but one of the new plans she’s got is Italy. I don’t know what she’s got in mind, but she’s aware that contemporary artists that she knows are going to Italy. I will say this: in no way did she go home with a sense of defeat. No sense ever that it was over.
She wanted to be a mother, she made that choice, she thought—she wanted it all. That was it.
One thing is for sure. That she should die eighteen days after giving birth makes this story haunting.
Perfect word: haunting.
So where does Modersohn-Becker stand right now? Is she still to be discovered?
By Americans, yes, indeed. I hope this opens scholarship. So much more could be done. I’m really hoping that serious scholarship starts here and that a different kind of scholarship starts on women’s art in the twentieth century, that, beyond looking at the individual artists and the monographs, somebody starts to establish that twentieth-century modernism—twentieth-century art—looks so different because of the participation of women in it.
