Being Here Page 7

  Otto drags all the still lifes out of Paula’s studio. He places them around the house and tries to draw inspiration from them, to discover the essence of them, the spark, the spirit. But, according to Paula’s mother, who keeps the poor man company, all he produces are ‘mathematical proofs’.

  And when the Vogelers want to buy one of Paula’s paintings, they have to insist that Otto part with it. Frau Brockhaus, a friend who visits the Brünjes’ studio, also buys a still life. The money allows Paula to reimburse Rilke, via Otto, whom she entrusts with the transfer. Along with the little painting bought by Rilke, they are the only three paintings she sells in her lifetime.

  As for Otto, he has sold five paintings so far this year. Paula asks her sister Herma to write to him and ask him for money…And asks her other sister, Milly, for sixty francs for models’ fees.

  Money pressures: the mainspring of her solitude, the dilemma of her independence.

  ‘I am becoming somebody.’ This is the mantra echoing through Paula’s letters. Neither Modersohn nor Becker: somebody.

  Bernhard Hoetger encourages her. Hoetger is a German sculptor she meets in Paris. He admires her talent, is astonished by it. Paula also meets his wife. It is looking to be a repetition of the early days with Modersohn: admiration, the need for approval, the only opinion that matters, I was feeling so alone, you believe in me, I’m weeping with joy, you open doors that kept me locked out…But Hoetger loves his wife. Paula does several portraits of her: a beautiful rectangular head, a square neck, a braid above her forehead, great strength in her upright bearing. ‘There is something very grand about her, and she is quite magnificent to paint.’ Her hand in the shape of a tulip.

  Hoetger himself is working on a ‘wonderful reclining nude, simply monumental’. Paula is gazing at a version of her future funerary monument. She has one spring and two summers left to live.

  She works. Still lifes, self-portraits, lots of large nudes. More than eighty pictures during 1906. A painting every four or five days. Feverish. She lives with her canvases, wakes in the night to look at them in the moonlight, starts work on them again at dawn. She tries to slow down, to spend more time on each one. But to linger on a canvas is to ‘risk ruining everything’.

  Rilke is still Rodin’s secretary and returns at the end of March after a trip with him. Along with a crowd of admirers, Paula and Rilke attend the unveiling of The Thinker in front of the Pantheon. But on 10 May, after a misunderstanding, Rodin dismisses Rilke as if he were a ‘thieving servant’. Driven away from Meudon, destitute and hurt, the poet takes refuge at the old address of 29 rue Cassette.

  Then he poses for Paula, in this time regained. They stand opposite each other, looking at each other, speaking or silent, in the mutual generosity of a shared gift. They forge this painting the way you forge friendship. A portrait that is the vestige of long hours together. Rilke is orange, white, black and green. He looks young. A pharaoh’s beard, a Hun’s moustache, a high, stiff collar, a broad forehead, dark-ringed, watery, bulging eyes, the whites of which are violet, raised eyebrows, his mouth open, thick-lipped. His nose is big, his beard rectangular. It is as if his face is skewed towards the right. Rilke looks into the distance, somewhere else, within; he seems struck by what it is that, for the rest of his life, will make him write without really knowing how to live.

  Paula sees what others do not. Twenty years later exactly, on 30 April 1926, the painter Leonid Pasternak writes to Rilke:

  I saw two portraits of you in a journal, Der Querschnitt. I forget the name of the artist of one of them, which does bear some resemblance to you; by contrast, in the other one—by Paula Modersohn, a quite well-known woman painter, not without talent, in my opinion—I found no resemblance whatsoever. Is such an alteration possible? I assume it’s a misunderstanding or a mistaken attribution, perhaps…Anyway, enough of that…

  During this spring of 1906, Paula and Rilke spend every Sunday together, in Fontainebleau or Chantilly, sometimes in the company of Ellen Key, a Swedish feminist friend of Rilke’s, much older than them. The two of them dine together on Saturday nights chez Jouven, on the corner of boulevard du Montparnasse and rue Léopold-Robert, a bistro described thus by a contemporary:

  The tables were so close together, there could be no secret conversations…We heard so many different languages spoken…And there were so many women painters! What sort of painting were they doing? They wore long skirts, it was the era of the jupe entravée, the narrow “hobble skirt”, and enormous hats laden with flowers and fruit.18

  Paula loves ordering the asparagus and Rilke the melon.

  On 13 May, returning from a walk to Saint-Cloud, Paula notices that she no longer has her bag. Rilke does his best, he tries everything, retracing their footsteps:

  I went back to our bench in Saint-Cloud, to the Blue Pavilion restaurant, to the spot where we had tea, to the park police station and to the Bateaux-Mouches office. At the last two places, I described your bag and the contents and I left your address. They will contact you if they find it, but I wouldn’t count on it. I was told that it would have already been handed in, if the person was planning on handing it in. But most thieves do not intend to return things. I am sad that the memory of our afternoon is now imbued with such loss. I am especially sad that irreplaceable things were in that little bag, but there is nothing more we can do about it.

  There will be more loss. The world is heading rapidly along the road to ruin, to unfathomable loss in the trenches at Verdun. And Paula has five hundred days left to live.

  At the beginning of June, Otto turns up in Paris without warning, to convince Paula to come home. Herma witnesses a difficult week. Perhaps because of it, the portrait of Rilke was never finished: the poet seems to have fled in the face of the husband’s arrival. The eyes, so preternaturally black, might not have been finished. But I like to see this as a deliberate breakthrough: Rilke’s vibrant gaze, and the opening for his ghost.

  Paula does not go home. The summer of 1906 is scorching. Her studio is infested with fleas, and she can’t see the sky because the glass roof is made of thick yellow glass. She wonders where to spend this summer. How to get through it. How to contend with the wasteland of heat, how to live the next minute. She does not know that life will be short, but right now it is unliveable. She yearns for fresh air and the countryside. ‘I hope to have many more summers, when I will be able to paint outside.’

  She has never been so hot in her life. On 3 August, her head spinning, she writes to Rilke, asking him to let her know if he has found a nice place for the summer holidays. If so, she’ll come. She signs the letter with a question: ‘Your Paula—?’

  Rilke replies that he is with Clara and Ruth near Furnes, on the Belgian coast. He doesn’t mention the name of the village. ‘This is not the sea you are looking for.’ And it’s expensive, almost as much as Ostende. Places like Morlaix and Saint-Pol-de-Léon would be much better. He writes out a list of train stations and advises her to buy the 1906 official guide to Swimming and Outings in Normandy at the Gare Montparnasse for fifty centimes. She should stay at the hotel Saint-Jean et des Bains. And not miss the Pointe de Primel cliffs. At Saint-Jean-du-Doigt, she should see the fifteenth-century Renaissance fountain and church, and walk along the tree-lined path to the beach.

  A strange, incongruous letter, written from Belgium and extolling the virtues of Brittany. ‘We all send you our best and wish you happy travel plans. The best train for Roscoff: 8.24 in the evening.’

  So Paula gives up. A coolness in the heat. Silence.

  A year later, Rilke writes her a letter full of regrets. ‘Now I can tell you that during all this time I have felt I made a mistake not writing to invite you to stay with us when your short letter was forwarded to me in Belgium. At the time, I was preoccupied by my reunion with Clara and Ruth, and I did not have a very favourable impression of East Dunkirk. It wasn’t until later that I had the feeling I had been grossly unfair in my reply, as well as inattentive to you at a tim
e in our friendship when I should not have been…What makes me especially sad is that I am not going to see you now.’

  They see each other for the last time on 27 July 1906, for dinner chez Jouven. They don’t know it—at that age, you don’t know it’s the last time, and when the person who is still alive thinks back over what was said, the meaning of the words is reduced to nothing. They will never again share their summers, they will never again go for walks together, there will be no more Sundays with Paula.

  On 12 August, the heatwave has passed. Paula is coping better with being stuck in Paris, and with being alone. There is a small pencil drawing of her studio. On the wall is a portrait of Frau Hoetger, and a large reclining nude with a child.

  It is through this nude that I first met Paula. I think it was in 2010 that I received an advertisement, in my junk mail, for a psychoanalysis symposium on motherhood. The image was a tiny illustration on the flyer, and at first it reminded me of a poster I had been fascinated by as a child. My parents had bought it, already framed, to hang in their bedroom. It was a reproduction of a picture of a mother and child, by Louis Toffoli, that artist of the seventies or eighties who mass-produced semi-abstract paintings of roundish-shaped people in vibrant colours. But it wasn’t by Toffoli.

  And the child in the image was a very young infant. Who was this artist, and where did this knowledge about breastfeeding come from? It was the first time I had seen a portrayal of that extremely comfortable breastfeeding position, not then taught in maternity wards and never featured in paintings of the Madonna and Child: not seated, not encumbered with the child on your arm, but lying down on your side with the child against you. Milky drowsiness, zoned out with milk and the warmth of the two of you. In 2010 I was breastfeeding my third child, and I continued for two years, ignoring advice to the contrary, including the rules I had set for myself.

  In 2001 I had written The Baby, an attempt to counteract clichés and questions like, ‘What does it mean to be a mother?’ When the book was published, I learned that some men cannot take motherhood seriously. Mother and child—the truth about this ordinary and fundamental experience is that men cringe if the mother is not represented as a Madonna (Virgin and Child) or a whore (Venus and Cupid).

  Paula is a painter, and she sees that the female model has fallen asleep with the baby lying opposite her. She does several pencil drawings and paints two canvases. The breasts have large areolas, the pubic area is black and luxuriant, the belly is round, the thighs and shoulders sturdy. In the drawings, the mother and child are cuddling, the ends of their noses touching; in the canvases, they are languorous and symmetrical, both in the foetal position, the large woman and the tiny child. Not sentimental, or pious, or erotic: another sort of sensuality. Boundless. Another sort of power.

  All I knew when I saw this painting was that I had never seen anything like it—a woman shown like that, in 1906. Who was Paula Modersohn-Becker? Why had I never heard anything about her? The more I read, and the more I saw (other powerful depictions of breastfeeding, the mother holding her breast as only a woman painter, perhaps, could allow us to see), the more I said to myself that I had to write the life of this artist and help to make her work known.

  In May 2014 I am in Essen, in the Ruhr, known primarily for mining. But this overpopulated, industrial nowhere-land, the last stop for the Thalys high-speed train from Paris, is home to one of the most beautiful museums in the world, the Museum Folkwang, with its light steel frame and huge bay windows. And in this museum there is a painting by Paula, one of her best self-portraits.

  I am with Michel Vincent, the director of the Franco-German Cultural Centre of Essen, and Hans-Jürgen Lechtreck, Deputy Director of the Museum Folkwang. Hans Jürgen is handsome, young, funny and astute. He is also embarrassed: he takes us down to the basement to see the self-portrait. It is a…he searches for the expression…‘temporary display’.

  The works on display in the basement of the museum are by women. The ceiling is low and the lighting is bad. Nowhere ever before have I seen to what extent women’s art is considered to be inferior to art. Upstairs, well lit: Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Kirchner, Nolde, Kandinsky, Klee. Downstairs, in the shadows: a mess of statues from antiquity mixed up with contemporary videos. Goddesses, mother-and-child paintings, queens: the only connecting thread is that these works are by women or represent women.

  Hidden, out of the way, behind a huge TV, is Paula’s masterpiece, Self-Portrait with a Camellia Branch. The situation is all the more perplexing given that the museum makes use of this self-portrait in its publicity materials: it floats vertically on a two-metre-high banner in the main street.19

  In reality, the painting is small. Sixty centimetres by thirty.

  She stares at us.

  Such suffering, says Michel.

  A very sad expression, agrees Hans-Jürgen.

  The two men even wonder whether they could glimpse tears at the base of the shining eyes.

  She has chosen to paint herself backlit. She leaves the viewer in the light. She seems to have the shadow of a smile on her face. But two furrows turn down the corners of her mouth. There are dark circles under her eyes. Her tulip-shaped hand holds a camellia branch, and she wears a heavy amber necklace. She is frowning slightly, concentrating.

  She is painting, that’s what I think. Which does not discount other interpretations: bitterness, disappointment in marital life, artistic isolation. But she is not settling any scores here. Her gaze is primarily fixed on her own painting and on the mirror where she is examining the shape of her features.

  It is a self-portrait of a woman painting.

  It is this self-portrait that the Nazis chose, along with another self-portrait, a full-length nude, in order to denigrate her work as part of the modernist, Degenerate Art, Entartete Kunst movement.

  This Worpswede artist, risen to fame after her death, is a huge disappointment. Her vision is so lacking in femininity, and so vulgar…Her work is an insult to German women and to our farming culture…Where is the sensitivity, the essence of the feminine-maternal spirit?…A revolting mixture of colours, of idiotic figures signifying farmers, of sick children, degenerates, the dregs of humanity.20

  In Paula’s work there are real women. I want to say women who are naked at long last: stripped of the masculine gaze. Women who are not posing in front of a man, who are not seen through the lens of men’s desire, frustration, possessiveness, domination, aggravation. Women in the work of Modersohn-Becker’s are neither coquettish (Gervex), nor exotic (Gaughin), nor provocative (Manet), nor victims (Degas), nor distraught (Toulouse-Lautrec), nor fat (Renoir), nor colossal (Picasso), nor sculptural (Puvis de Chavannes), nor ethereal (Carolus-Duran). Nor made of ‘pink and white almond paste’ (Cabanel, whom Zola made fun of). With Paula there is no getting even at all. No sign of rhetoric, or judgment. She shows what she sees.

  And also: real babies. The history of art has given birth to countless versions of a horribly rendered little Jesus at the breast of a sceptical Madonna. A face like a monkey, an old man’s neck, suckling that conjures up at best a cow, at worst a game of carom billiards—one red ball and two white balls. No, the babies in Paula’s paintings are babies I have seen in the flesh, never in paintings. The wide-eyed, concentrated, almost fixed gaze of the little person sucking. The hand on the breast, or the closed fist. Just a crease for a wrist. Floppy neck. Plump legs without muscles. Arms that are sometimes thin. Ruddy cheeks, or pale, but never the same complexion as the adults. And, around them, Paula’s oranges, round and full.

  When little Elsbeth touches Paula’s breasts in the bath and wonders about them, Paula replies lyrically, ‘Breasts hold a wonderful secret.’ The origin of the world: right there in her breasts. It’s already scandalous that little humans come out of women’s vaginas, but that breasts are used to provide food, well, that amounts to theft, misappropriation. It’s hard to picture Manet’s Olympia with a newborn at the breast. As for the Virgin’s
Vagina, now we’re entering the realm of madness.

  I don’t know if there is such a thing as women’s painting, but men’s painting is everywhere. When Paula visits the Louvre, the paintings of only four women artists are on display: Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, the first woman to have graced the walls of the museum; Constance Mayer and her allegorical paintings; Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and her portraits done in pastel; and Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot, a more recent woman artist, whose work was exhibited in the Louvre at the beginning of the twentieth century. In a letter from Rilke to Clara about the 1907 Autumn Salon, he talks about a whole room devoted to Berthe Morisot, and a wall devoted to Eva Gonzalès; it was sufficiently unusual for him to have mentioned it.21 Whether it’s in museums or galleries, there are inordinately fewer women painters exhibiting than women being exhibited, and the latter are very often naked. And when, in the reign of Napoleon, Constance Mayer painted naked men, she was greeted with boos and jeers.22

  They paint women. ‘They’ implies here the universal masculine pronoun, centuries of the masculine gaze. In the spring of 1906, Paula is reading The Masterpiece by Zola. In this novel, inspired by Cézanne, the woman, the model, grows older, her flesh sags and her painter husband comments that ‘pouches of fat were forming under her armpits’. By the end of the novel, the woman is naked, ashamed, abandoned in the icy studio: ‘She lay there, as if dead, like a white rag, miserable, done for, crushed beneath the fierce sovereignty of Art.’