Being completely unfamiliar with Paula Modersohn-Beckerʼs work, I read ahead a bit, and I am very much looking forward to learning more about her. And since I get to do that with all of you, with Constance's guidance, and that VIEW, what could be better?
I hope to see many of you there. Enjoy the thaw! x Jacquie
Christineʼs Minutes Fourteen members of the Literature Club gained some altitude and convened in Carla’s lovely apartment overlooking the river. We lunched on delicious and healthy vegetarian chili and arepas and then were bowled over by olive oil orange cake and yummy pudding.
In a brief recount of recommended books and theatre, we heard about Studying with Miss Bishop, by Dana Gioa, All the Beauty in the World, by Patrick Bringley, a guard at the Met Museum, and Metropolitan Stories, by Christine Coulson, who also worked at the Met.
At the uncommonly early hour of 12:57, President Joanna rang the bell. Carla read her excellent minutes of February 5th, taken in the absence of Christine.
The treasury remains the same.
Then we were off to the fascinating world of art and artists in the early years of the twentieth century.
But first: Constance informed us that her primary source was the PhD thesis of Diane Radycki, “Paula Modersohn-Becker – The First Modern Woman Artist.” This thesis, submitted in 1993, was the very first ever written about a female artist for the Harvard Department of Fine Arts. Additionally, the thesis was not about one of the usual artists to be mentioned along with the word female, such as O’Keefe, Cassatt or Kahlo, it was PAULA MODERSOHN-BECKER. Modersohn-Becker was born in 1876, and died in 1907, at the tragically early age of 30. She was little known during her lifetime, and it wasn’t until the 1970s that her art began to garner the international acclaim and recognition it deserves.
In a brief recount of recommended books and theatre, we heard about Studying with Miss Bishop, by Dana Gioa, All the Beauty in the World, by Patrick Bringley, a guard at the Met Museum, and Metropolitan Stories, by Christine Coulson, who also worked at the Met.
At the uncommonly early hour of 12:57, President Joanna rang the bell. Carla read her excellent minutes of February 5th, taken in the absence of Christine.
The treasury remains the same.
Then we were off to the fascinating world of art and artists in the early years of the twentieth century.
But first: Constance informed us that her primary source was the PhD thesis of Diane Radycki, “Paula Modersohn-Becker – The First Modern Woman Artist.” This thesis, submitted in 1993, was the very first ever written about a female artist for the Harvard Department of Fine Arts. Additionally, the thesis was not about one of the usual artists to be mentioned along with the word female, such as O’Keefe, Cassatt or Kahlo, it was PAULA MODERSOHN-BECKER. Modersohn-Becker was born in 1876, and died in 1907, at the tragically early age of 30. She was little known during her lifetime, and it wasn’t until the 1970s that her art began to garner the international acclaim and recognition it deserves.
Constance also drew material from Paula Modersohn-Becker – The Letters and Journals, Edited by Gunther Büsch and Liselotte von Reinken. Constance passed around Paula Modersohn-Becker, Ich Bin Ich/ I Am Me, the catalogue that accompanied her recent show at the Neue Galerie in NYC, so that we could appreciate some of her paintings.
The first letter we read was from Paula’s mother, on the occasion of her thirtieth birthday; her mother recalled the dreary day in Dresden when, at the age of 23, she was giving birth to her second child. In Paula’s response to her mother, it was significant what she left out: her plan to divorce her husband, Otto Modersohn, and go to Paris to pursue her art.
How was Modersohn-Becker the first modern woman painter? She was the first to paint women’s bodies without the hitherto omnipresent ‘male gaze.’ She painted female nudes, and nude self-portraits, she painted mothers and infant, in the nude. Her models were ordinary women, set in ordinary situations, with the simplest of surroundings. Yet during her brief lifetime, there were so few exhibits of her work, that she was not considered an emerging artist, or considered much at all. The first exhibit was in 1899, when she was 23, and then in 1906, she had four paintings in a group show in Bremen. That was it.
A year after her death in 1907, her friend Rainer Maria Rilke published a poem “Requiem to a Friend,” memorializing PMB. Then in 1917, ten years after her death, her family arranged for an exhibit of her work, to be accompanied by a book of her letters and journals. Rilke, however, refused to edit the work because he thought the letters would distract from her art. The book went on to be published and was reprinted many times. Thankfully, otherwise she might have been lost to us when her work was purged by the Nazis as degenerate.
Paula Becker was born in Dresden, often referred to as the Florence on the Elbe, in 1876. Her father was an engineer, and her mother came from an aristocratic family, but the Beckers lived in constrained circumstances, likely due to the fact her Paula’s Uncle Paul Becker had tried to assassinate Kaiser Willhelm of Prussia. Meanwhile, Bismark had succeeded in unifying the German states, for the first time in history.
After her confirmation, PB went to London to stay with her aunt, with the plan that she would learn household management. She was 16. Her letters have much to say about the churning of butter, and not much about Paula’s conflicts with her aunt and her desire to study art. Her uncle came up with solution to the household conflict: at his expense, Paula would attend art school for 6 hours a day. Paula’s letters turned from butter to painting from Greek casts. She explains that the young women at their easels sat on high stools, while the men had lower stools.
Still, Paula had headaches and was painfully homesick and so returned to Bremen after 8 months abroad. As her sister Millie had done, she attended a two-year program of study to become a governess. She was allowed to take art lessons from a Bremen artist, and then to go study art in Berlin, at the Berlin Ladies Academy. There she could paint from models, but not nude models, and PB felt strongly that she wanted to paint nudes.
Whenever she was home from school, Paula visited Worpswede, an artists’ colony outside Bremen, founded by Fritz Mackensen and Otto Modersohn, part of the romanticized back-to nature movement that was springing up all over Europe. She met Clara Westoff, and they remained close friends for the rest of Paula’s life. Clara later married Rainer Maria Rilke.
In a letter to her sister Millie – which Paula asked not be shown to her parents – Paula discussed how her art deviated from the norm.
In 1899, the work of 18-year-old Paula Becker, and another woman artist, was part of a show in the Kunsthalle in Bremen. Her work was panned and called coarse, repulsive, repugnant and more. Not a happy beginning.
On January 1, 1900, PB took a train to Paris to join her friend Clara and immerse herself in the art world there. She became enamored of Cezanne. She enrolled at the Academi Colarossi and attended daily classes. In her letters home she described the marvelous art she was seeing: Manet, Degas, Renoir and of course, Cezanne. At Worpswede, Paula, Clara, Rilke, Otto Modersohn and his first wife, Felice, formed a close group of friends. Paula wrote often to the Modersohns and encouraged them to come to Paris. In June, Otto visited Paris, but without his very frail wife, Felice, who died soon thereafter. Paula and Otto become engaged on September 3 of that year. Paula’s parents were so distressed by the rapidity of the affair that they sent Paula to Berlin for cooking classes. An interesting and appealing response, I thought. In Berlin, she spent time with Rilke and frequented art museums. Paula and Otto married in May 1901. He was 36 and had a 2-year-old daughter; she was 25, determined to be an artist, but under pressure from her father to become a governess in order to earn a living. In a journal entry from Easter Sunday 1902, PMB wrote “marriage does not make one happier.” Meanwhile, she returned Paris and stayed with Rilke and her friend Clara Westoff; they were now married and had a daughter. They encouraged PBM to meet Rodin. She also saw the work of Gauguin and wrote sheaves of letters. She painted like mad. It was in a letter to Rilke that she wrote “Ich bin Ich” that is, I am Me.
But her husband, Otto, was not pleased with her art. He said that it didn’t ‘progress’. Which seems odd, given the remarkable paintings she was making. It is unclear what transpired in their relationship, but when she was 30 years old, in 1906, Paula became pregnant. She stated while she did not want to be ‘married’, she did want a child.
Matilda, named for Paula’s mother, was born on November 6, 1907. A week later, she began to have pains in her legs. She died on November 20. She was 31.
In the years following her death, PBM’s work began to be shown. A museum was built in Bremen dedicated to her work. Hitler deplored its architecture, so we can assume it was good. Then the Third Reich condemned her work as degenerate, and they seized and destroyed about 70 paintings.
Thanks to Connie, and the Neue Galerie in Manhattan, many of us are now getting to know the story of PMB, and her astonishing paintings. It was a revelatory afternoon.
Respectfully submitted,
Christine Lehner, Recording Secretary
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