The trope of the neglected female artist may have completed its journey from urgent historical necessity to cliché last fall when the Cape Ann Museum attempted to reposition Josephine Nivison Hopper as a key talent of her time. (If her husband Edward could look stiff, he was facility itself compared to her.) So it bears mentioning that the Neue Galerie presentation of Paula Modersohn-Becker, now in its final days, pays off in defiance of that exhausted gambit. Unlike Jo Hopper, she really was a key talent of her time, and her work has not been adequately recognized. The Neue show is the first dedicated American exhibition of her work. The professional disadvantages of her sex were substantive and acute, and culminated in the ultimate insult, death at the age of thirty-one, of a postpartum embolism.
By that time, however, she had produced an astonishing seven hundred paintings and nearly twice that many drawings, a Van Gogh–like exercise of talent in the years prior to an untimely end. Her art only ever looked derivative in her early drawings, which are nevertheless extraordinarily able and urgent, and during a phase of Gauguinism that affected her painting style for mere months in 1906. Her oeuvre is otherwise an achievement of originality and sensitivity that merits comparison to any of her contemporaries.
I began thinking seriously about Paula Modersohn-Becker when I reviewed a biography of the painter Florine Stettheimer for the June 2022 issue of this magazine. Therein the author claimed that Stettheimer had in 1916 created “the first nude self-portrait decidedly painted from a woman’s gaze.” The claim hinged on the presumption that Modersohn-Becker’s nude self-portraits from ten years earlier had been painted from a man’s. It sounded suspicious at the time, and having inspected the latter in person at the Neue, I can state with confidence that the assertion is bunk
Modersohn-Becker’s nude self-portraits are unselfconscious, bordering on unflattering. She portrays herself in a symbolist language, connecting enigmatically to myth. She holds fruits or flowers with the ingenuousness of Eve before the expulsion. She looks like a goddess, in the literal sense and not in the colloquial one. The 1916 Stettheimer self-portrait, if indeed that’s what it is (the title is only A Model), in comparison seems like an advertisement for a harlot.
The fact of the matter is that in 1906, Stettheimer was still trying to arrive at a style and paint something of note. She was developing a jaded outlook, informed by her sour temperament and nascent European feminism. Modersohn-Becker, who was five years younger, was already producing original work and had embraced the Lebensreform movement with such gusto that we have sketches by her husband Otto, dated to 1905, of her doing calisthenics in the nude. Modersohn-Becker was the modern woman that Stettheimer’s biographer wishes Stettheimer had been.
Modersohn-Becker’s painted universe was as full of children as Stettheimer’s was lacking in them. Excepting the Gauguinesque ones from around 1906, her subjects are preternaturally individual, with Sleeping Child (ca. 1904), painted in oil tempera, reminiscent of later Lucien Freud in its unsentimental observation and gritty paint handling. (To my disappointment, neither the exhibition nor the catalog explains what “oil tempera” is. It’s possible to emulsify a whole egg with linseed oil and various witch-potion additives; what little is said in the technical literature about this art-mayonnaise amounts to “Here be dragons.”) Portrait of a Girl with Her Hand Spread across Her Chest (ca. 1905) has enormous presence, with all of the guilelessness, vulnerability, and will of a real kid. The painting comes to a graceful midpoint between realism and expressionism, with handling vaguely reminiscent of Gwen John but with a more German emotional tonality.
At that point Modersohn-Becker did not yet have a child of her own, but she hinted at her aspirations to become a mother in Self-Portrait on Sixth Wedding (Anniversary) Day (1906). At the time she was separated from her husband, and that information throws a complex psychological gloss over the painting. The figure is nude to the waist. Her hands frame her belly suggestively. Her expression is too nuanced to summarize but hints at honest self-appraisal. She is observing the anniversary with her estranged spouse with an embodied evaluation of her circumstances, pregnant at that point only with possibilities but taking literal pregnancy under consideration. That childbirth killed her a year later makes this painting heartbreaking to spend time with, but the background of tinted lime captures an atmosphere of optimism nonetheless. Reclining Mother with Child II (1906) hints at what might have been, personally and artistically. A nude woman lies with her nude infant, their forms painted with great tactility and an appreciation of the mother’s protective, even architectural relation to the child. It achieves expressionism without the bombastic color or tortured drawing we usually associate with the style. It’s tragic that she didn’t have the opportunity to explore it longer.
Modersohn-Becker had a troubled friendship with Rainer Maria Rilke, of whom she painted a charming and slightly mocking Nabi-looking portrait in the Neue exhibition. They had a correspondence that included a poem he wrote to her, a few lines of which were, “I am with you, who listen to the sound,/ that always hums and for which we sometimes exist;/ we lost our fear that it will fade away.” There is something equally enduring and fundamental in Modersohn-Becker’s compositions, outlasting her and even outlasting her relative neglect.
