Paula Modersohn-Becker: ‘For Isn’t Art Also Love?’
Words by Madeleine McClean
“I can feel it again now: love never ceases
even when everything else comes to an end. […]
For isn’t art also love?“
Letter from Paula Modersohn-Becker to Clara Rilke-Westhoff, May 13, 1901
This week I found myself in the deliciously pink corridor of the Norman Rea’s long gallery, as part of celebrations for the opening night of ‘The Practice of Love’. Knowing that this would be the last exhibition organised by the current committee, the festivities were bittersweet, but the celebration of love still shone through. ‘Okay, love you, bye’, rings out on repeat from an installation exploring female friendships, cutting through conversations between female friends. A free, hand-painted bookmark ensures I take some of the love home with me. A feat of chickenwire engineering brings to life a dreamy scene of domestic bliss, as a teacup nestled in the metal warms the sculpture with life. Love is in the air, and in ‘The Kissing Cups’. For anyone that missed opening night, the exhibition will still be on display for the next few weeks, until the upcoming elections decide the next committee!
All of this had me thinking about exhibitions and artists I’ve loved discovering this year, and one stuck out to me: The Neue Galerie’s exhibition on ‘Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich Bin Ich’. Whilst not as well known as her male contemporaries, she is a very significant figure in the history of early expressionism and modern art. She is also the first known woman painter to paint nude self-portraits, and the first woman to have a museum devoted exclusively to her art. Personally, I was most drawn to the honesty of her self-portraits with their raw brushwork, and her thematic engagement with motherhood.
Paula Modersohn-Becker, ‘Self Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand’, 1907, MoMA
From this portrait, it is clear to see where the exhibition derived its name from. A year before this painting and her first pregnancy, following a temporary split from her husband Otto Modersohn, Paula wrote to her friend the poet Raina Maria Rilke asserting ‘I am me (ich bin ich), and I hope to become me more and more’. This attitude of self-determination and self-knowledge imbues this work with its spiritual force, presenting a new perspective in the treatment of female subjects by women painters. Her painting techniques are as original, as the rough application of block, bold colours will help to usher in the work of later expressionists. Her right hand, protectively resting on her abdomen, is our only clue as the fact that she is pregnant in this portrait, marking this out as the first modern woman artist to have painted herself pregnant. The two flowers symbolise fertility, and perhaps a balancing of the roles of mother and artist. However, the knowledge that she is tragically to die shortly after giving birth to her first child lends this portrait a deep poignancy.
Paula playing guitar
Paula Modersohn-Becker, ‘Self Portrait at Sixth Wedding Anniversary’, 1906
Although the artist’s pregnancy appears much more conspicous in this painting, she is not in fact with child. Instead, in the words of S. Hubbard she is ‘not pregnant in this painting. The painting, then, is a metaphor for how she felt about herself as a young artist: fecund, ripe, able for the first time in her life to create and paint freely in the manner that she wished. What she is about to give birth to is not a child but her mature, independent, artistic self…’. (On a side note, this reminds me of the words of Renaissance poet Sir Philip Sidney in ‘Astrophil and Stella’, ‘thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes’ - Paula plays into this artistic trope of being full of or pregnant with creative invention, though her creative ‘throes’ are apparently more fruitful than those of the speaker in the poem). Her depiction of the female nude is refreshingly direct, as she rejects the overt eroticization of nudes by artists like Picasso and Matisse. Despite the slight abstraction and the partial covering, we still get a sense that she is more ‘naked’ than ‘nude’, that we are being privileged a view of the artist as she sees herself as opposed to the disguise imposed by the perception by another; such is the power of taking herself as the subject. In the words of John Berger, ‘to be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised as oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object to become a nude’ - and in this portrait, she is far more subject than object.
Paula Modersohn-Becker, ‘Mother and Child’, 1903
Paula Modersohn-Becker, ‘Birch Tree in a Landscape’, 1899
Another interesting facet of Modersohn-Becker’s oeuvre is the output from her time in the artist’s colony in Worpswede, Germany. Though much of her work is inspired by the works of Gauguin, Cezanne and Van Gogh that she encoutered on numerous trips to Paris whilst living there, Worpswede itself provided inspiration through its rural landscapes and its people, particularly the women and children such as the ones pictured above. The intersection of these influences can be seen in the signature ‘naive’ style of the Worpswede Birch tree painting, echoing the postimpressionist Gauguin in her pursuit of formal simplification.
‘I can feel it again now: love never ceases, even when everything else comes to an end. […] For isn’t art also love?’. That was the question posed by Paula to her good friend Clara Rilke-Westhoff, the sculptor and wife of Rainer Maria Rilke who lived alongside her at Worpswede. By this she seems to imply that Love and Art are alike in their timelessness, and that both will outlive the one who experiences them. To her, the experience of love is akin to creation, and is as fundamental a human experience as art. In this sense, she has answered her own question and proven that art is alike to love, as her work continues to move and shape us even after her untimely death at the age of 31.
