The Bliss and the Risks

At the auction houses the predatory collectors come and go, talking of resale prices high and low. How much can you get for current favorites—Cecily Brown? Mickalene Thomas?—or for early Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden? And what about all the women artists whose work, once overlooked, is enjoying a revival, suddenly seen in a new, brighter—and inevitably more commodified—light: Hilma af Klint, Alice Neel, or Leonora Carrington, whose painting Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) sold for $28.5 million at Sotheby’s in May? (Her previous high was $3.3 million.)

Now here comes Paula Modersohn-Becker, a German Expressionist painter who died in 1907 at the age of thirty-one, less than a month after giving birth to a daughter, having earlier expressed much ambivalence about both marriage (“My experience tells me that marriage does not make one happier”) and motherhood (“I’m not ready for that yet”).

In her lifetime Modersohn-Becker sold very few of her seven-hundred-some paintings and nearly 1,400 drawings. She was mostly reviled by critics, accused of being a “naive beginner” and “unqualified,” with a “wretched lack of ability.” Her own mother, who supported her efforts from the beginning and fueled her ambition, called one of her later paintings “ghastly.” (Self-Portrait with Camellia Branch (1906–1907), painted in tempera on cardboard, features her characteristic huge eyes, flattened perspective, and somewhat subdued palette.) And though he admired her work, her friend Rainer Maria Rilke introduced her to Auguste Rodin as “the wife of a very distinguished painter.”

Modersohn-Becker’s letters and journals, selections from which were published posthumously in 1917, are full of sharp impressions of people she met, evocative descriptions of the art she encountered on her trips to Paris, and moments of stirring self-reflection. I came across them when they were first translated into English in 1983 and was taken with the portrait they offered of a forceful yet vulnerable young woman trying to shape her art and her life. (“If I could really paint!” she wrote in her journals in 1900. “A month ago I was so sure of what I wanted. Inside me I saw it out there, walked around with it like a queen, and was blissful. Now the veils have fallen again, gray veils, hiding the whole idea from me.”) But outside the art world, not many people in the United States had known the art of Modersohn-Becker before a retrospective of her work, “Ich bin Ich/I Am Me,” opened in June at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan. Her ascension to greater visibility raises questions about how we assess artistic talent, how reputations are made, and how we reevaluate once-neglected artists, particularly women.

Paula Becker was born in Dresden in 1876, the third of seven children. When she was twelve her family moved to Bremen, a small, wealthy city in northwestern Germany. Her dour, Russian-born father served as an official with the Prussian railway system. He was a member of a local art association, and along with his wife, who liked to draw, he took Paula’s novice efforts seriously. At one point her mother took in a boarder to pay for her art lessons. “It would be the greatest joy,” she wrote her daughter in 1892, “if you could really accomplish something, something more than the little bit of dabbling which all young girls can manage.” Her father’s assessment, when Modersohn-Becker was twenty, was more severe:

I do not believe that you will become an artist of the first rank, blessed by God. That would have already become obvious by now; but you do have, perhaps, a sweet talent for drawing which can be useful to you in the future.

When she was sixteen Modersohn-Becker’s parents sent her to London to stay with an aunt and learn the basics of housekeeping in preparation for marriage. (These included churning butter, operating a sewing machine, and arranging flowers.) After less than a year she left to attend a co-ed art school for two months, where she focused on drawing in graphite and charcoal and eventually painting. Back in Bremen, her parents persuaded her to take a two-year teacher-training course in the hope that she would then work as a governess. But her unyielding determination to continue on her path as a painter—the “great and lonely truth,” as she referred to it in her diary—convinced her parents to allow her to attend classes at the Association for Women Artists in Berlin. The German artist Käthe Kollwitz, nine years her senior, had taught there. Modersohn-Becker shared Kollwitz’s interest in painting the poor and working class without degrading them, although Kollwitz’s approach was more socially conscious, more connected to her religious upbringing, and more overtly attentive to the wretched conditions of her impecunious subjects, including starving children.

For the next two years, from 1896 to 1898, Modersohn-Becker took landscape and portrait classes and saw the work of old masters at museums in Berlin, including paintings by Rembrandt and Holbein and drawings by Michelangelo and Botticelli. She eventually focused on the figure, although in classes for women both female and male models were chastely draped. She learned the technique of chiaroscuro and was otherwise driven to become as good and informed a painter as she could be—notwithstanding the cultural dismissiveness about the place of female artists—but voiced her persistent self-doubts in her journal. “I’m still struggling with my material with great difficulty,” she wrote. “I still see things so childlike, untrained, too trivial.”

During her studies in Berlin, Modersohn-Becker visited Worpswede, the small artists’ colony just outside Bremen that emphasized a slightly retrograde realism, akin to the French Barbizon school, which celebrated landscapes and peasants. She thought it idyllic and decided to stay. (“The beautiful brown moor, delicious brown! The canal boats with their dark sails. It’s a wonderland, a land of the God.”) She found a kinship with other members, including Clara Westhoff and Heinrich Vogeler, as well as Otto Modersohn, whose large atmospheric landscapes she admired and whom she would marry after he was widowed.

Her own landscapes, several of which are in the exhibition, frequently featured birch trees, whose elegant white trunks spoke to her in an almost animistic way. “I wandered beneath the birch trees,” she wrote in her diary. “There they stood, chaste and naked. Their bare branches stretched out to the sky, praying devoutly.” In paintings like Birch Trunks in Front of a Red House Wall (circa 1901), the trees seem to be growing beyond the picture frame. Modersohn-Becker often painted people from the local poorhouse. She depicted them with large, worn-out hands, sunken chins, and blacked-out eyes, conveying the strain and the dignity of rural life. In Farmer’s Wife, Seated (1899), the subject’s defiance comes through her unflinching gaze and the grim lines of her mouth.

Her focus was women, young and old, nude and dressed. One of my favorite pieces in the exhibition, Seated Girl in Profile to the Left (1898–1899), shows Modersohn-Becker’s capacity to enter a subject’s mind and establish an intensity that implicates the viewer, quietly and without hyperbole. A girl of twelve or thirteen in a simple burlap dress looks down through wheat-colored lashes. Her auburn hair is in a braid. Her chair melds into the coppery brown of the background; the colors seem intentionally muted instead of muddy. I want to know what she is thinking.

Another charcoal work on paper that caught my eye is Standing Female Nude, Turned to the Right (1898), which is almost ghostly in its effect. A woman with full breasts and a slightly protruding belly stands against a lined, shadowy background, her face barely filled in, as though she has given up on asserting her presence.

Modersohn-Becker delighted in Worpswede’s rural beauty but always had her eye on Paris. She took the first of four trips there on New Year’s Eve, 1900, walking the grands boulevards and joining in the revelry at Paris dance halls with Clara Westhoff. They stayed in the same cramped, bohemian hotel on the boulevard Raspail. Modersohn-Becker studied at the Académie Colarossi and at the École des Beaux-Arts, both of which provided special studios for women.

At the gallery of Ambroise Vollard, a patron of the avant-garde, she encountered the work of Cézanne, whom she described as “one of the three or four French painters who has acted upon me like a thunderstorm.” Her exposure to Cézanne pushed Modersohn-Becker toward formal simplicity and looser brushstrokes that produced an unpolished surface—“coarse-grained,” as she called it—which she developed in the years to come.

In May 1901, Paula, then twenty-five, married Otto Modersohn, a recognized artist eleven years her senior, recently widowed with a three-year-old daughter, Elsbeth. “His paintings alone endear me to him. He’s a gentle dreamer,” she wrote. They wed in Worpswede, shortly before the death of her father.

Modersohn had believed in his wife’s talent from the moment she had arrived at the colony in 1898. He saw her as “a genuine artist, of whom there are few in the world, she has something quite rare. Nobody knows, nobody esteems her. Some day all this will change.” The couple often worked together on similar subjects, whether Elsbeth, peasants, or orphans. Her style was freer than his; her brushwork was less restricted and more impressionistic. And she alone focused on motherhood. She drew mothers breastfeeding or sleeping with their babies; the former especially caught her imagination, as they had Kollwitz’s. She wrote in her diary:

I’ve drawn a young mother with a child at her breast, sitting in a smoke-filled hut…. She was breastfeeding the large one year old bambino…. And the woman was giving her life and her youth and strength to the child in all simplicity, without realizing that she was a heroic figure.

In 1976 the feminist art historian Linda Nochlin wrote of Modersohn-Becker’s portraits of mothers and children that she

transforms the mother into a being entirely transcending time or place, a dark, anonymous goddess of nourishment, paradoxically animal-like, bound to the earth and utterly remote from the contingencies of history or the social order.

The large, lavishly colored oil Kneeling Mother with Child at Her Breast (1906; see illustration at top of article) gives evidence of an unsentimental view of maternity; the mother is nude, with one nipple being suckled by a chubby infant and the other nipple staring out at us like a pink button. The mother’s face is in half-profile, fixed less on the baby than on some thought that has caught her attention. There are two potted plants, and she is surrounded by scattered oranges, which bring out the blush in the baby’s cheek. The painting shows the influence of Gauguin, whose work Modersohn-Becker saw in the collection of the museum conservator Gustave Fayet. Looking at it, I was struck by the scale of the figure and the sense it gives of both the sensuousness and strength of motherhood, so different from the soft, unmistakably feminine interpretations of Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot.

Modersohn-Becker rather quickly soured on her marriage. Although she and Otto respected each other, she appears to have felt confined by his ideas about painting, their constant togetherness, and his need to live in the “peaceful, serious” countryside rather than a turbulent city like Paris. She expressed her disappointment in 1902 in her diary and to Clara, to whom she confided that she and Otto were not able to consummate the marriage. She also had a great need for solitude, for being alone with her work.

Otto, for his part, had had his own doubts even before they got engaged, finding her “far too ultra-modern, free to the point of excess.” In 1903, with her husband’s reluctant consent, Modersohn-Becker returned on her own to Paris, where she studied the Impressionists and the Japanese woodcuts in Tadamasa Hayashi’s famed collection. She sketched as well from the great antique and Egyptian art at the Louvre. She wrote warm letters to Otto, calling him “dear boy” and pointing out that she “devoutly” wore her wedding ring. “What,” she asked, with a certain maternal woefulness, “does Elsbeth say about her traveling mother? Does she speak well of me?” The two had grown close. Paula let Elsbeth bathe with her and touch her breasts.

As if to compensate for her separation from her stepdaughter, upon her return from Paris, Modersohn-Becker drew delicate but unsentimental portraits of children from indigent Worpswede families who were often shabbily dressed or naked with pouchy bellies; she also looked to her family for models. Her Seated Nude Girl with Her Legs Pulled Up I (circa 1904) highlights the vulnerability of a child who seems to have recently taken her clothes off and clasps her knees in a self-protective gesture. Two of my favorite oil paintings from this period are the celebratory Girl Blowing a Flute in the Birch Forest (1905), with the vertical lines of her beloved white birch trees in the background, and Two Girls in White and Blue Dresses, with Their Arms around Each Other (1906), which conveys a certain wariness toward the viewer. The girl in white is in profile and looks as though she is wearing a white mask to match. The girl in blue stares out with wondering big eyes.

Back in Paris in 1905, Modersohn-Becker registered for a life-drawing class at the Académie Julian, where Gauguin had studied. She saw paintings by Matisse and the Fauves at the Salon des Indépendants and attended retrospectives of Seurat and Van Gogh. This was also her first exposure to Picasso, who was exhibiting at the Galerie Serrurier.

While in Paris, Modersohn-Becker decided to leave Worpswede. The years she spent there were “probably the five most beautiful years of my life,” she wrote, but she found it limiting. And even though Otto and Elsbeth had joined her in Paris, she decided she had to leave her marriage, too. “Her only real desire is: not to be married,” Westhoff wrote Rilke in February 1906. Somewhat regally, Paula still requested that Otto send her money each month.

Her world kept expanding. In 1905 Modersohn-Becker had a brief affair with the economist Werner Sombart. (She painted a portrait of him with a crimson outline around his head and shoulders; he described it as “the revenge of a disappointed mistress.”) Also that year she visited the studio of Vuillard. The painter and sculptor Bernhard Hoetger advised her to stop taking lessons; he took her to see various shows, including Gauguin’s 1906 retrospective. She immersed herself in African masks and paintings by Henri Rousseau, Bonnard, Braque, and Munch. These artists’ signatures made their way into her work, inspiring her to add sudden daubs of color to a canvas and to take an almost neo-Cubist approach to figuration. “What I want to produce,” she wrote Hoetger, “is something compelling, something full, an excitement and intoxication of color…. I wanted to conquer Impressionism by trying to forget it. What happened was that it conquered me.”

After moving into an artist’s atelier in 1906, she painted many images of herself, including enormous nude self-portraits and paintings of Italian mothers and their children, whom she found at a weekly market for prospective models. That fall Otto, who had stayed in Worpswede, returned to Paris. He convinced Paula to resume their married life. They exhibited a number of works together at the Kunsthalle in Bremen. In spring 1907 the couple returned to Worpswede, with Paula expecting a child.

She immediately hatched plans to go back to Paris. “Nothing could keep me away from Paris,” she wrote Clara. But then, on November 2, she gave birth. In a black-and-white photo of her sitting up in bed with her three-day-old daughter, Mathilde, she looks calm and happy. Fifteen days later Modersohn-Becker suffered a pulmonary embolism and died. In 1927 the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum opened in Bremen, the first museum in the world devoted exclusively to the work of a female artist.

A question nags at me after seeing the exhibition, and even after reading about Modersohn-Becker’s strength of purpose, her substantive if small cadre of admirers, and her readiness to experiment with various techniques and approaches: How is one finally to assess her talent in the face of her growing reputation? It’s difficult to take in her work without viewing it through the prism of her tragic early death from inadequate postpartum care and the lack of recognition during her lifetime. Who, one wonders, might she have become?

I ask because as I walked around the show in June I felt a host of different reactions: “Yes, yes,” I would think excitedly about one piece; “perhaps,” about another; and sometimes a definite “no.” Her work seemed to veer from fluidity to an almost intentional klutziness or awkwardness, and her palette often appeared brownish, despite her insistence that she loved color. Clearly her potential was enormous, and her receptivity to the artistic forces around her laudable. But is one to judge her by her passion for making art, or by her paintings on the wall? Intention and inspiration are not, after all, the same as accomplishment.

This is a question that can be asked about other women artists who are being celebrated now—sometimes those who died young, like the photographer Francesca Woodman, who earlier this year had a show at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, or sometimes those who have stuck around long enough to assert their own prominence and then are “rediscovered,” with all the hyperbole in the attendant marketing (which no doubt shoots up the value at auction). In Modersohn-Becker’s case, it strikes me that the current recognition owes something to our wish to understand the route to Modernism.

Modersohn-Becker was hindered, just like Gwen John and Dora Carrington, by being a woman at a time when female artists were seen as unlikely specimens and art education was still separated by sex. She wasn’t particularly political, but she had instincts for independence. She was an admirer, for instance, of the diaries of the Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff, who lived in Paris and who died of tuberculosis in 1884 at the age of twenty-five. Bashkirtseff had written, “I know that I could be somebody, but with petticoats what do you expect one to do? Marriage is the only career for women; men have thirty-six chances, women only one.” These thoughts, Modersohn-Becker wrote in her own diary in November 1898, “enter my bloodstream and make me very sad.”

“Somebody” she certainly became: there are works of art in “Ich bin Ich” that are nothing short of remarkable, including the many still lifes she painted toward the end of her life. They feature household items: jugs, plates, cups, candlesticks. There is a succulence to many of them—Still-Life with Fish (1906) shows a fish fresh from the market lying on a newspaper, its bulging eye seeming to reprimand us—even if sometimes they look more like technical exercises borrowing from Cézanne than discrete works of art with a life of their own.

I found the fifty paintings at the Neue Galerie beautifully hung; they were spaced across four rooms, each one painted a different color. Modersohn-Becker’s range of subjects is striking, as is her facility with charcoal and pastel on paper or tempera on large canvases or boards. Most powerful, to me, are her self-portraits, of which she painted thirty during her fourth and final stay in Paris, and her nudes. They attest to her search for autonomy and an almost matter-of-fact sense of daring.

Self-Portrait with White Pearl Necklace (1906) is the artist at her purest—unidealizing and straightforward. She is wearing a brown dress with orange-red polka dots, and the background is the palest blue. The pearls of her necklace are deliberately unmatched; they almost look like teeth. Her face tilts slightly to the left; her brown hair is wrapped around her head. Her brown eyes, drawn without pupils, stare out dolefully.

Self-Portrait on Sixth Wedding (Anniversary) Day (1906) is thought to be the first self-portrait of a female artist nude. She wears only a string of amber beads. Although she looks pregnant, with a distended belly, the painting was completed eight months before Modersohn-Becker actually became pregnant, and one can speculate that it represents an affirmation of her own fertile creativity, as an artist and mother. (Her ambivalence about motherhood is, in its way, ahead of its time, suggesting a conflict that would become more strident in the decades to come.) Modersohn-Becker’s nudes, for the most part, are sensual and naturalistic, not mere objects of voyeurism. (The artist apparently liked swimming and dancing naked at night.) Reclining Female Nude (1905–1906) is her most directly sexual rendition of a full-breasted woman in an odalisque position. Most of her other nudes are less evidently directed at the male gaze, if at all.

“Ich bin Ich” shows a woman artist gradually coming into her own, trying on different styles and attitudes. Modersohn-Becker’s abilities cannot be doubted, nor can her commitment, but it remains unclear to me whether her paintings reach the transporting level of “genius,” as some have claimed. The simplifying, monumental style and rough brushstrokes that she came to embrace exude power but also—especially in her last portraits, which show the influence of Cézanne, Picasso, and Gauguin—leave out something in the way of individual expressiveness.

And yet: I find myself inspired and moved by Paula Modersohn-Becker, her persistence and porousness not least. She experienced life through her senses and had the ability to imbue her work with a kind of psychological charge. Modersohn-Becker had the impulse to take risks but lived at a time when women artists were not encouraged to. A smaller, more focused show might have displayed her still-maturing talents more effectively than this overextended retrospective, but it is good to have her before us, looking toward the future, moving from one stage to the next even at her young age, dreaming of where her next painting will take her.