The Brooklyn Rail

After the death of the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) following childbirth, her friend, the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a lengthy and deeply felt elegy, lamenting, that “you should stray back, you, who have achieved more transformation than any other woman.” Seventy years later, Adrienne Rich fired back at Rilke in a peevish poem written in Modersohn-Becker’s voice and addressed to Clara Westhoff, Rilke’s wife. “I was your friend,” she complains. “His poem was like a letter to someone who has no right to be there.” Modersohn-Becker’s mother also shaped but simplified her legacy, publishing a book in 1917 of her daughter’s carefully culled letters and journal selections that became a German bestseller. In recent decades, as well, Modersohn-Becker often has been taken up by novelists, biographers, and critics who often largely reduce her to feminist icon, oppressed wife, ambivalent mother, misunderstood artist. In the United States, unfortunately, there has been little opportunity to view her actual art, which is held almost entirely in Germany. Filling that void, curators Jill Lloyd of the Neue Galerie and Jay Clarke of the Art Institute of Chicago have expertly organized Ich Bin Ich / I Am Me, celebrating the achievement, range and depth of Modersohn-Becker’s brief but prolific career.

A room of her early drawings, selected from a miraculously existing 1,400, reveals an artist whose precocious technique, developed in formal study in London, Berlin, and Paris, was always in search of her subjects: mostly women and children, plain in demeanor, presentation, and body. They do not engage with the painter but with themselves, eyes fixed in a middle distance, bodies often centered around oversized and momentarily idle hands. The overall effect evokes a subject’s separateness, an individual soul present but beyond definition, the past etched in every line. In Woman in Profile, Turned Right (1898–99), for example, we see the drag of time in the deep lines circling the woman’s forehead and mouth, her prominent upturned nose still pointing her forward into the unknown.

As a young art student, Modersohn-Becker wrote to her parents that, for her, Rembrandt was the “one who painted with devotion.” In her charcoal drawings, we see how she emulated that devotion with her attentive but confident sketching. Her drawing continued at great pace in her early years in Worpswede, the art colony in northern Germany where she moved in 1898 and eventually met Rilke, Westhoff, and her future husband Otto Modersohn. Her attempts at painting were less successful, giving her “a gigantic bear of a hangover,” as she put it.

Intent on further education, she made her first solo trip to Paris, entering the city on January 1, 1900, seeking less German-centered art instruction and to begin anew. After six months of intense study, she returned to Worpswede even more intent on depicting a world beyond realism. Most often in her paintings of children and old women (her models were often inhabitants of the local poorhouse), but also in landscapes of the sparse stands of birch and browning fields surrounding Worpswede, the viewer enters into a folk or fairy tale. Her “sunken bell” mood, as she called her response to the landscape and its hardscrabble population, is evident in the less realized figures, their limbs attenuated and clumsy, their faces flat and often roughly delineated. Girl with Yellow Wreath and Daisy (ca. 1901), shows a child in blue dress, eyes round and otherworldly, clasping a flower as a halo of yellow hovers above a face far too strange, even with its reddened lips, to be considered angelic. One only wishes that she could tell her tale.

With its generous selection of paintings from her final years, this exhibition repeatedly shows how Modersohn-Becker metabolized artists for her own nourishment. Embracing Paul Gauguin’s use of symbolism, for example, and building on her own early use, she depicts heavy-limbed, nude, young girls decorated with strands of thick beads or holding glowing fruit. These girls, though, are innocent, lingering in the magic of childhood, far from the adult world.

Conversely, under Paul Cézanne’s sway, we see Modersohn-Becker tackle still-life, often imbuing inanimate subject matter with a sense of adult sexuality and even violence. In Still-Life with Jug and Bottle (ca. 1903), the orange glare of bunched marigolds, a phallic baguette, and the opposition of two separate sets of citrus fruits suggests how a domestic vocabulary can construct a lie. Similarly in Still-Life with Pumpkin (ca. 1905), the crude slash of a recent knife through a hairy pumpkin is palpable, the spill of fruit an afterthought. Having rarely depicted the domestic, Modersohn-Becker repeatedly evokes in these paintings the menace that lies beneath the ordinary.

During her final stay in Paris, after leaving her husband in February of 1906, Modersohn-Becker painted over half of her sixty self-portraits. Seeming to have no thought of finding a market for her work, she entered ever more deeply into her own vision as she approached thirty. The curators’ selection of this revolutionary body of work makes clear the artist’s protean energy, as well as her genius for props—flowers, branches, fruit, necklaces, hats, household objects, dresses, and hairstyles through the centuries all make appearances. The best known of these paintings, Self-Portrait on Sixth Wedding (Anniversary) Day (1906), depicts a self-acceptance not often seen in the work of women artists. The artist’s knowing, forthright glance, her modestly distended belly, her small, maidenly breasts, her matronly amber necklace, her laborer’s clumsy, reddened hands cupping from above and below that which is truly hers are all contradictory details that make of her a whole. She knows she is pregnant with what she has given herself; we do not unless we empty our minds of all assumptions.