From Modest Young Woman To Immodest Goddess: Paula Modersohn-Becker’s Self Portraits - Article by Donald Kuspit

 Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-portrait on the 6th wedding anniversary (1906)

By DONALD KUSPIT October 26, 2024

…within the world into which he is born he can remain tied to the past, to the ways of family, peer group, community, trying to fit in and thus to retain the security of embeddedness, or he can try to be born more fully, to emerge from such embeddedness and to become capable of interest in and love for the larger and richer world in which he lives, and thus discovering its infinity and inexhaustible mystery.  This discovery is possible only in the fully open encounter with the world when one does not cling to the protection of the familiar and the past….Only by emerging from such embeddedness and by becoming himself can man realize his potentiality, and this means, in Fromm’s words, that “the whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself.”                                                                   

-- Ernest G. Schachtel, Metamorphosis(1)

Solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support.                                                                                          

-- Anthony Storr, Solitude(2)                                                                                                                                                     

Credited with being the first woman to paint herself naked—Self-Portrait as a Standing Nude, 1906--one has only to look at photographs of Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) to realize that she is utterly changed—metamorphosized into the “Venus of Worpswede,” as Tine Colstrup writes.  But she is not the idealized nude Venus of antiquity and the Renaissance, with a classically perfect body, and with that oddly unnatural, but a naked woman with a realistic imperfect physical body, given to her by nature, rather than classically perfect, and with that deceptive—a lie. The Venus in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, ca. 1485 hides her genitals, as though in shame, like Eve after the Fall, but in Self-Portrait as Standing Nude with Hat, 1906 Modersohn-Becker’s exposed loins have the same orange color as the orange she holds in her right hand.  The painting seems to have more to do with the variety of oranges in the work—her orange hat with its long orange ribbons, the orange fruit she holds in her right hand, the yellowish orange she holds in her left hand, and the orange hair on her genital—than with the naked body of the immodest faceless woman.  (As the art historian Kenneth Clark notes, the idealized body of the classical nude is deceptive—oddly inauthentic, not to say a lie, as perfection, being impossible in life, always is—in contrast to the naturally naked realistic body, authentic and truthful all the more so because it is imperfect.) 

Worpswede is a small village 18 miles northeast of Bremen in Northern Germany that became home to an artist’s colony in 1889.  “Not unlike the Barbizon painters outside of Paris or the Dachau Artists Colony outside of Munich, beginning in the late nineteenth century artists came to Worpswede in search of an untouched ‘paradise,’ far from industrialized urban spaces and rife with picturesque imagery for their canvases.”(3)  Otto Modersohn was one of the first artists to travel to Worpswede; Paula married him in 1901, and moved there with him.  The artists who lived and worked there “mainly painted landscapes as well as idealized images of the region and its inhabitants.”(4)  Modersohn-Becker learned to draw from life from Fritz Mackensen, and followed his “choice of subjects:  rural peasants and inhabitants of the local poorhouse.”(5)  Perhaps more importantly and influentially, he taught her “life-size figure drawing.” 

The Worpswede painters were traditional artists, rather than the avant-garde artist Modersohn-Becker became, influenced by Cezanne, whose paintings impressed her when she saw them in Paris at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery in 1900, the first time she travelled to Paris.  In 1903, on her second trip to Paris, she visited the Louvre frequently, filling sketchbooks with drawings after paintings, among them Italian Early Renaissance paintings, and work by Cranach, Zurbaran, Ingres, Goya, Rembrandt and Veronese.  She seems to have been particularly interested in Egyptian antiquity, especially sculpture and Fayum portraits.  She also saw works by Manet, Renoir, Zuloaga, Cottet, and Degas.  Rodin showed her his watercolors.  On her third trip to Paris, in 1905, she saw the paintings of Vuillard and Denis, Matisse and the Fauves, Seurat and Van Gogh, and Gauguin.  In 1906 she saw the work of the Douanier Rousseau and African masks at the Musee de l’Homme.  On her way back to Germany, she saw the exhibition of one hundred years—1775-1875—of German art in Berlin, noting the work of Leibl, Trubner, Bocklin, Feuerbach and Marees.  In 1907 in Paris she saw the Cezanne retrospective, “one of the three or four powerful artists who affected me like a thunderstorm.”  Her daughter Mathilde was born on November 2^nd.  On November 20^th Paula died of a pulmonary embolism.  She was 31.

 Rainer Maria Rilke as painted by Paula Modersohn-Becker
 

 “A child is necessary for a woman to be a real woman,” she said, and in “Self-Portrait on Sixth Wedding (Anniversary} Day,” 1906 she shows herself pregnant with a child, her hands proudly around her belly as though holding it, but she was not yet pregnant.  This “phantom pregnancy”—a sort of parthenogenesis, that is, the production of an offspring without needing a male partner (at the time she made the painting she told her husband she wanted to leave him) is a wish fulfillment.  It gratifies her desire for artistic as well as personal autonomy, symbolizes her—woman’s—innate creative power, and suggests that giving birth to a child and making a painting—generating a work of art--are in principle the same.  Artistic creativity is a kind of phantom pregnancy, that is, the artist is pregnant with an imaginary child—his or her work.  Women are the model artists—primordial artists—for they can create babies, “model” works of art, with the merest “inspiration”—a bit of sperm.  But Modersohn-Becker did not need that bit of maleness to give birth to her self-portraits, for she had become a Magna Mater, as Lucretius said Venus was.

Passionate about art, knowledgeable about the work of traditional and modern artists, from different countries and with different styles and subjects, technically skilled and self-consciously an artist in her own right, critically insightful, making masterful paintings with solid figures with a sculptural presence, Modersohn-Becker seemed to have absorbed all she had seen.  But as she said in 1899, “Naturalism is the only true way, if only because it assumes and demands a much greater diversity of individual types, something that is impossible in idealism.  Idealism generalizes.  I did, too.  And the fact that I don’t do it any more, I see as my most important step forward.”(6)  On April 9, 1906 she wrote:  “I’ve seen wonderful Courbets.  I think he is greater than Manet or Monet.”  But however much she started out as a realist with an idealizing bent—her peasants are distinctive individuals but also social types—she became a kind of primitivist, more particularly what Robert Goldwater called a ”romantic primitivist,” with a peculiar affinity with Gauguin.(7)  Shedding her civilized clothes in her naked self-portraits, she has “gone native.”   She had become “the ancient Eve” Gauguin wrote to Strindberg about, “who can logically remain nude before our gaze,” in contrast to the “Eve of civilized conception” who “in such a simple state could not move without being indecent, and, being too pretty (perhaps), would be the evocation of evil and pain.”(8)  There is nothing pretty or indecent about the “naked and primordial” Modersohn-Becker but a certain rugged integrity.       

On February 23, 1906 Modersohn Becker moved to Paris, leaving her husband.  She seemed to be both anxious and elated about doing so, as the letter she wrote to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was married to her close friend Clara Westhoff, and for a time lived at Worpswede, suggests:  “I don’t even know how I should sign my name.  I’m not Modersohn and I’m not Paula Becker anymore either.  I am Me, and I hope to become Me more and more.  That is surely the goal of all our struggles.”  On April 9, 1906 she wrote to Otto Modersohn, the husband she left, “I feel so insecure about myself since I have abandoned everything that was secure in me and around me…Will you send me, at least for the immediate future, one hundred and twenty marks each month so that I can live?”  On April 22, 1906 she writes about her decision to leave Worpswede, where she was once happy and secure:  “Those were probably the five most beautiful years of my life, the ones I spent in Worpswede,” but “It is too limited there for me,” she adds. 

Seated boy with straw hat under birch trees, 1904

Clearly she is caught on the horns of a dilemma.  On the one hand the safety and security—embeddedness--of marriage and provincial Worpswede, affording the “protection of the familiar,” on the other hand on her own in “the larger and richer world” of cosmopolitan Paris, a cornucopia of art, old and new, and the chance to “become somebody,” to make a name for herself, as she wrote to Rilke.(9)  She misses the happiness she felt in Worpswede despite the limited sense of self she felt there, symbolized by the peasants and handicapped people she identified with by picturing them, but she also misses the limitless bounty of art in Paris, where she hopes to make art as original as the art she saw in some of its art galleries and museum exhibitions.  Paris is the place where reputations were made, Worpswede was a provincial backwater in an artistically backward country compared to France.  Modersohn-Becker was in a limbo of uncertainty.  Money would enable her to afford to live in the big expensive city, but it would not make her feel less insecure about herself in Paris, where she had no personal support—husband, mother, Clara Westhoff, Rilke—and was anonymous. 

Paris was a society, Worpswede was a community.  As Ferdinand Tonnies wrote in his brilliant study of their difference, in a community people are “organically” and personally connected by their shared beliefs and values, in a society people are “mechanically” and impersonally connected by their self-interest.  Social relations are cooperative in a community, competitive in a society.  In a community there is a sense of moral responsibility to others, in a society there is a tendency to irresponsible amoral behavior.  People care for each other in a community, feel emotionally connected to each other; in a society people care less for each other because they are strangers to each other, and with that indifferent to each other.  In a society “exchange value” is the social rule.  As Oscar Wilde said, “we know the price of everything and the value of nothing”—in a society as distinct from a community.  Moving to Paris, Modersohn-Becker was on her own in a strange and estranging society, trying to make it big in a big city—but not sure what “big art” to make in a city in which there were all kinds of “big” new and “big” old art. 

    Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand

She was so taken by the lure of the big art city of Paris that she failed to realize that she had come into her own in the small art village of Worpswede—in a community of more or less like-minded artists rather than an anonymous place of competing artists, all struggling to be different and modern—make works that were sensationally new, as though newness was an end in itself, as though having one’s art labelled as new automatically made it significant.  I think that Modersohn-Becker admired Courbet because he paints his true self rather than like Manet the false selves of the conformist crowd.  The true self is spontaneously alive, according to the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, while the false self is socially accommodating, even as it “searches for conditions in which the true self can come into its own.”(10)  She in fact blossomed into a true self in the solitude of her self-portraits, as the flower she holds in Self-Portrait with Red Rose, ca. 1905 and the two red flowers she holds in Self-Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand, 1907 suggest.  “Red, the color of fire and blood is regarded universally as the basic symbol of the life-principle, with its dazzling strength and power,”(11) and “flowers are the symbol of the love and harmony characteristic of primeval nature,” and “with that of the paradisal state of innocence.”(12)   In Self-Portrait with Camellia Branch, 1906-1907 she has a beatific smile.  In Still-Life with Clay Jug, Peonies, and Oranges, May/June 1906 the jug is a symbolic womb, the peonies that seem to grow out of it and the oranges it seems to have hatched symbols of its fertility—creativity.  The Kneeling Mother with Child at Her Breast, 1906—both are naked, the infant seemingly newborn, the mother earth-colored, kneeling on a small circular aura-like white carpet, indicating she is sacred, with the yellowish fruit and green plants around her suggesting she is Mother Nature—epitomizes her wish to have a child.  She realized it, but it killed her, even as it made her happy, as the glorious smile on her face as she holds her newborn baby indicates in the in the photograph of her shortly before she died.  She would not have come into her own as a woman, a mother, an artist, in the competitive chaos of Paris.  It was a place to learn, not to live.

But it was at the end of October 1906 that her estranged husband Otto came to Paris to spend the winter with her.  On March 7, 1907 she writes to her mother “Perhaps in October you will be grandmother again.”  Her mother had to wait until November to become a grandmother again.  Paula may have become pregnant in Paris, but she gave birth in Worpswede.  She probably would have a miscarriage in the bustling art society of Paris, full of conflicting and ruthlessly ambitious and competitive “advanced” male artists.  Only in the rural community of Worpswede, which nourished and supported her as the cruelly competitive city of Paris never would or could have, could she give birth to her daughter and her hyper-narcissistic art.  Even ambitious artists need the security of embeddedness to emotionally support the solitude they need to be creative and become original.  WM

Notes

(1)Ernest G. Schachtel, Metamorphosis (New York:  Da Capo Press, 1984), 14

(2)Anthony Storr, Solitude:  A Return To The Self (New York:  The Free Press, 1988), 29

(3)Jill Lloyd, “Paula Modersohn-Becker:  Becoming Me,” Paula Modersohn-Becker, Ich Bin Ich/I Am Me (Munich, London, New York, Prestel, 2024), 48

(4)Ibid.,

(5)Ibid., 49

(6)Ibid., 55

(7)Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (New York:  Vintage Books, 1967), called Gauguin a romantic primitivist.  “You will always find nourishing milk in the primitive arts, but I doubt you will find it in the arts of ripe civilizations,” Gauguin wrote to his daughter, p.66.  He also found it in primitive people.  So did Modersohn-Becker, who found it in the “primitive” people who lived in Worpswede, among them the Old Woman in Left Profile, Holding a Stick, 1898-99, the Woman in Profile, Turned Right, 1898-99, the Woman Weaving in Profile, Turned Left, 1898-99, the Seated Farmer with a Stick, 1899, Farmer’s Wife, Seated, 1899, Woman with Red Blouse in Profile, Turned Left, 1898-99, Seated Old Woman with Hands Folded in Her Lap, 1898-99, Blind Woman in the Forest, 1899, Seated Old Woman, 1899, and Old Poorhouse Woman With Glass Ball and Poppies, 1907, among many other works.  I call these works empathic realism—humanistic realism.  Still Life with Sunflowers, Hollyhocks and Daisies, 1907, one of the last paintings Modersohn-Becker made, was discovered in her studio by her mother, who wrote “The brilliance of the hollyhocks made everything else seem dead,” suggesting that her daughter put her life into her art, raising the question of how Modersohn-Becker would have raised her daughter, had she lived.

(8)Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 1968), 83  

(9)Quoted in Lloyd, 39

(10)Salman Akhtar, Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London:  Karnac, 2009), 105

(11)Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionary of Symbols (London:  Penguin, 1996), 792

(12)Ibid., 395