On a hot day, a museum can be the perfect refuge, an escape from the heat, the glare, the crowds, the noise of summer in the city. You cross the threshold and enter into another world of soft light and shadows, whispering voices, and quiet respect for the works on display and those come to admire them.
Late July in Paris is hot, the city is crowded, but there are fewer tourists than in years past. Some are afraid to travel to a country where attendance at a rock concert or a fireworks display can end in death.
Others seize the day and its splendor in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. In the metro, there are more languages than I would know how to identify; in the streets, plenty of tourists bent over a city map.
In the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, the city’s museum of modern art, until August 21st, there is Paula Modersohn-Becker, a German artist from the city of Bremen whose short life spanned 31 years. Born in 1876, she began drawing when she was 16. Sent to the home of an aunt in England to learn how to keep house like a good Hausfrau, she learned to draw instead.
In 1899, she had her first exhibit in Bremen. Confronted by her paintings, some critics, filled with disgust, considered her work impure. There was no reverence, no piety. How could a woman, pure and pious by nature, create in such a way?
Paula Modersohn-Becker, trained to be a teacher, prefers to read and paint. Thanks to a small inheritance from an uncle, she can do just that. With her friend, the sculptor Clara Westhoff, she moves to Worpswede, a small village on the swampy moorland between Bremen and Hamburg.
A group of painters have created an artists’ colony there. Like the members of the Barbizon School in France, they paint in the open air. Living together, working together, they spurn the influences of the city and aspire to the purity that only Nature can provide.
Paula Becker joins them, attracted in particular by the work of Otto Modersohn, who paints the immense skies, the canals, the birches and marshes of Teufelsmoor, the Devil’s Swamp, stretching for miles around Worpswede.
Modersohn is married and has a small daughter, Elsbeth. His wife has tuberculosis, a fatal illness at that time. Four months after her death, Modersohn and Paula Becker are engaged. Her parents are ready to give their consent if their daughter agrees to move for a few months to Berlin to attend cooking school. Her father encourages her to submit to her husband in all things; such are the foundations of a happy home.
Paula, a dutiful daughter, bows to their wishes. The couple marry in 1901, after Paula’s return from from Berlin and her first stay in Paris. There she studied anatomy and discovered Cézanne. Influenced by his desire to reduce nature to its geometric essentials, she sets out to paint her personal vision of the world and people around her.
Between 1901, the year of her marriage, and 1907, that of her death, there are three more trips to Paris. During that period, she produces over 700 paintings and drawings. She learns to cook but she does not submit. She wants recognition and believes she deserves it for her pioneering work as a painter.
Back in Paris, she discovers Gauguin, Monet and Rodin, whom she meets and whose watercolors she particularly admires. Of him she writes to Otto, “Can you imagine what it must be like to be completely indifferent to what others think?”
Otto is a good husband. He encourages his wife to paint and recognizes her exceptional talent, yet he feels the path she is following is wrong. For him, Nature and purity, the holy isolation of Worpswede; for Paula, the city and everything new. In his eyes, the abstraction she is introducing into her painting is little more than crude form.
In 1906, Paula leaves again for Paris and she leaves Otto, desiring an end to their five years of marriage. She does not want a child, she wants to paint. She is thirty years old, she has created a body of work she can be proud of and has much further to go.
During this final stay in the world capital of art at the beginning of the 20th century, Paula Modersohn Becker, along with Picasso and Matisse, is revolutionizing painting, making it more personal and abstract, cubist, expressionist, “fauve” or “wild.”
In 1906, Paula Modersohn-Becker paints the first nude self-portrait by a woman, introducing a completely new perspective on the female nude, the almost exclusive domain of men up to that time. She paints a series of naked nursing mothers with a monumental naturalness never before seen in art.
She also continues to paint portraits and self-portraits. The American art historian Diane Radycki, author of Paula Modersohn-Becker: The First Modern Woman Artist published in 2013, claims that Picasso himself may have seen her portraits and been influenced by one in particular, by a certain turn of the head, which enabled him to finally complete his massive portrait of Gertrude Stein.
There were also hundreds of still lifes. Before Matisse, in one, she included a fish bowl with three goldfish, elements of life, movement and constant chromatic change. The French call the still life “nature morte,” dead nature. Modersohn Becker gave it new life.
Then she changed her mind. She wrote to Otto and asked him to come to Paris. It was a mistake to want their marriage to end. They spend six months in the city together. She becomes pregnant and returns to Worpswede to give birth.
A daughter, Mathilde, is born on November 2, 1907. Labor is difficult and lasts two days. The doctor orders Paula to remain in bed. Eighteen days later, he gives her permission to rise. She takes a few steps, sits down and dies of a pulmonary embolism.
“Schade” (what a pity) was her last word.
After a couple of hours with the paintings of Paula Modersohn-Becker, I leave the museum deeply moved, refreshed and more alive.
P.S. For readers who might be wondering about French country living the hard way, by the end of August, I may have a home…
