Being Here

by Marie Darrieussecq

  Let us look at men struggling with women. Rilke apropos of Clara: ‘Living with a woman artist constitutes an utterly new problem.’

  When it comes to Otto, he thinks he is the only one who understands Paula.

  The fact that she is somebody and is accomplishing something, no one thinks about that…

  All by herself she will struggle along and one day she will astonish everyone (as I did). That is what I look forward to. At the same time, she is learning to be a housewife, and even today she certainly knows as much about that as Frau Vogeler.

  In July 1902, Otto is blindsided with admiration by a portrait Paula paints of Elsbeth in the orchard. ‘I can’t keep up with her now. I am simply bowled over by it…It will be a race.’ He is especially dazzled by her sense of colour, but he laments the fact that the independence, indeed the vanity of his ‘friend’ sometimes gets in the way of her wifely duties.

  When he visits his parents, Paula writes and tells him how free she feels, divinely free, how she loves walking alone on the moorlands. She would also like to go back to Paris. She informs him that the picture he is in the middle of painting, the one he wants to be grand, is merely pompous.

  In this first year of my marriage I have cried a great deal and my tears often come like the great tears of childhood…My experience tells me that marriage does not make one happier. It takes away the illusion that had sustained a deep belief in the possibility of a kindred soul. In marriage one feels doubly misunderstood. For one’s whole life up to marriage has been devoted to finding another understanding being. And is it perhaps not better without this illusion, better to be eye to eye with one great and lonely truth? I am writing this in my housekeeping book on Easter Sunday, 1902, sitting in my kitchen, cooking a veal roast.

  The routine, the cooking. Things. The morning light falling on her notebook. The miserable roast.

  Sundays with Paula.

  The other days of the week, Bertha, the servant, worked from seven in the morning until seven in the evening, and also looked after Elsbeth. Otto was earning a good living and, among other things, paid for his wife’s studio. Without being rich, Paula’s parents had never lacked for anything either, especially on her mother’s side, the von Bültzingslöwens. And her uncle Arthur, who had made a fortune, was always there if there was a problem.

  Needless to say, the problem is having to ask.

  ‘The best remedy for me would be to have a private income of ten thousand francs!’ writes the Swiss painter Sophie Schaeppi, Paula’s contemporary at the Paris art school, the Académie Julian. Thirty years later, in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wishes for a similar amount—five hundred pounds sterling.

  In November 1900, Paula painted the Worpswede church, ‘a white-grey glimmering sky and part of a red church blending deep and harmoniously into this damp, autumn mood’. After persistent practice, she trained herself to write Paula Becker on the canvas. She wrote to her older brother, Kurt: ‘A young woman like me is still an ignorant creature. I have also heard bells ringing out the news of many things, but I don’t know in which tower the bells are. That is a feminine vice. Whether it is inherited or learned, our grandchildren will have to decide.’11

  And she rang those bells, with Clara, against the rules, like poaching, like taking what is yours by right. She fended for herself and found classes other than cooking. She played with the bell-tower rope that threatened to hang her: ‘children, kitchen, church’, Kinder, Küche, Kirche, the three Ks, the German program for women.12

  Paula paints young girls at the age when they start to grow up. She paints them in the sky, from below. Martha Vogeler, the young blonde girl. Her large pale forehead, her serious gaze, her oval face. A single tree in the left of the picture. A white apron over a black smock. Or a red blouse, hair loose. Or a filmy veil, grey-mauve like the sky. Full face, a gaze so sad it gives you a lump in the throat. Or in profile, the nose, the chin, a triangular hill, the forehead curved like the horizon.

  A twenty-five-year-old woman paints a girl who is becoming a woman. A young married woman paints a very young married woman. What they share remains silent. Time is reverberating. The sun is always shrouded in these paintings. Here, in this place, outside, in the woods and in the fields, is the fuzzy presence, muffled but powerful, of young human beings alive in the world. It’s not about what young girls are dreaming, but what they are thinking.

  Martha Vogeler, escaped from one of her husband’s paintings, Pre-Raphaelite daisies in her hair, wearing a sky-blue tunic, holding a vase in her hands. This serious, slightly hieratic pose, the gaze off into the distance, will be Paula’s style from now on: a solemn young girl carrying an object as an offering. Nothing exalted, no awkwardness, no deliberate eroticism. There is no anguish or secrecy in these worlds—these are worlds of thought.

  ‘Strength and intimacy’, writes Otto in his journal in 1902. He is particularly fond of these portraits against the background of the sky. ‘She is an artist through and through. She is certainly the best woman painter who has ever lived in Worpswede.’ He also praises her ‘naivety and simplicity’, but Paula is neither naive nor simple. She knows what she is looking for. She aims for the essence of things, something complex and clever. Above all, she knows only too well what she is moving away from. From the Vogeler style, but also from the Worpswede style. Perhaps she also knows that she is painting after centuries of the male gaze. Perhaps she is conscious of something she has to say, something specific to her, still almost unheard of, still almost not seen: a woman painting women. Her naked young girls are nothing like Munch’s Puberty. In Munch’s painting, there are the hunched shoulders over the budding breasts, the arms crossed to hide the pubic area, the troubled look in the girl’s eyes, her red cheeks, and the enormous overhanging shadow—there is no shadow in Paula’s painting.

  She is having an affair with the sun: that is how she describes it to Clara just before their falling-out. Not the sun that divides, that shatters the image into shadows, but the sun that unifies things: low on the horizon, heavy, contemplative, as if extinguished. That’s the sun she paints: no shadow, no effects. No added meaning. No innocence lost, no virginity defiled, no female saints sacrificed. Neither discretion nor false modesty. Neither madonna nor whore. Here is a young girl: already these two words are excessive, loaded with Rilke-like reveries and with masculine poetry. These girls are saying: ‘Leave us alone!’

  Nineteen hundred and two. A young girl in front of a window. The face is framed by two vases. Behind, there are trees, and always the triangular hill. The face is inclined forward, gazing into the distance, wistful and pensive.

  Paula painted it on a slab of slate. It is as if the dress, the vases, the eyes all draw a dusky grey from this unusual medium. The face is split by a hairline fracture. The slate is cracked. The picture cannot be moved. I went back to Bremen especially to see it.

  The other major picture from the productive year of 1902 is the portrait of Elsbeth in the orchard. The little four-year-old is wearing a short-sleeved dress, white with blue polka dots, curving over the contour of her belly. What removes all sentimentality from this beautiful picture is that it comes after the crayoned, charcoaled, knock-kneed, swollen, clumsy bodies of the Worpswede models. It comes after an enormous amount of work.

  Mother, I’m sorry this letter won’t turn into the usual punctual Sunday letter it should be, but there is good reason for that, namely, the work I’m doing. It consumes me, heart and soul…The dawn has broken in me and I can feel the day approaching. I am going to become somebody… The time is soon coming when I will no longer have to be ashamed and remain silent, but when I will feel with pride that I am a painter. I have just finished a portrait of Elsbeth. She is standing in the Brünjes’ apple orchard. Here and there a few chickens are running around, and next to her stands an immense flowering foxglove.

  Paula abandoned perspective. Elsbeth is flat against the plain. She is exactly the same height as the foxglove. The chickens are in
front of her chest. The grass, the woods and the sky constitute three strips of colour. Her feet are in the roots. Her face is forever tilted towards childhood. Her dress is an explosion of white. Not a single shadow. How did Paula give those little cheeks, those little arms, the soft, round texture that is absent from the rest of the painting ? It took her twenty-seven years—her whole life.

  IV

  In February 1903, Paula persuades Otto to let her go back to Paris.

  She finds a studio at 203 boulevard Raspail. The rent is thirty-nine francs a month, thirty marks. She says she is bothered by the noise of the electric trams and by not having a view: she would like to see ‘at least one tree’. She fills her room with the scent of eucalyptus. She takes up life-drawing classes again at the Académie Colarossi. She goes out for lunch and in the evening prefers to have crêpes and hot chocolate in her room. She misses Bertha’s cooking, especially herrings with sour cream. She ekes out the smoked sausage her mother sends her from Bremen. She sees the Rilke couple again and finds them pleasant but sinister. ‘They trumpet gloom, and now they have two instruments to do it on.’

  At the Louvre, Mantegna is a revelation; she had already studied black-and-white reproductions of his work in Worpswede. And Goya: the subtle grey of a silk dress, the pinkish red of a face. Veronese. Chardin. Rembrandts yellowed with old varnishes. Drawings by Ingres. David. Delacroix. At the Musée de Luxembourg, she sees paintings by Manet, the ‘nude with the negress’ and the ‘lunch outdoors’. She adores revisiting In the Land of the Sea, a triptych by Charles Cottet, outlawed by the official academic art of the time. And then there are Japanese prints and masks, the Hayashi auction rooms. Her focus shifts. ‘Everything is immensely strange.’ She is struck, too, by the Fayum mummy portraits on the Egypto-Roman sarcophagi, their serious, candid expressions, their contemporary features, and the fluid application of the colours. When she looks around at human beings again, she realises they are more surprising than the story told by artistic conventions.

  She moves into 29 rue Cassette, where she finds her tree and her silence. Every morning, fresh bread is delivered to her door, she drinks her hot chocolate and goes to the Louvre. Then she has lunch chez Duval, where they serve fried eggs. She rediscovers the second-hand booksellers on the banks of the Seine, and the violet sellers on the Pont des Arts. She sends bouquets to her mother, to Otto, and to Martha Vogeler. An orange to little Elsbeth for her fifth birthday. She describes the big pink birds in the Jardin d’Acclimatation, ‘their long feet like Papa’s’.

  She tries out her French on the concierge’s son, and tells Otto that the boy flirts with her. She sometimes finds it difficult to go out by herself, so shows her wedding ring, without which she feels ‘chilly’—the French behave like big kids in the wild. She refers to them in the same way people might have spoken about Africans.

  A nap, then off to the Jardin du Luxembourg, where she works on her sketches. She is reading Notre-Dame de Paris and admires the real gargoyles. Rilke has the flu; she takes him tulips. She thinks he has become a sycophantic socialite, and that Clara is in love with herself. She asks Otto for a hundred and eighty marks, because she has spent all her money. And also a little watch. Has Elsbeth grown? And Otto? She is having a good time.

  She likes the carnival, the confetti that sticks to her ankles, and she likes the lilac, in bloom by the end of February, and the willows flowering in the beginning of March, such wonders for a girl from northern Germany. She likes the Marché du Temple, where the working-class girls buy their clothes: cheap silks, lace blouses, faded artificial flowers, satin ballerina flats worn thin by dancers. ‘Intimacy,’ she writes, ‘is the soul of great art.’ She wants to paint skin, fabrics, flowers: what the genius Francesca Woodman will photograph seventy years later.

  She goes to see Rodin at Meudon. Rilke’s letter of reference, in French, announces her as ‘the wife of a very distinguished painter’. It’s Saturday, visiting day; there are already a lot of people in the studio filled with marble statues. She comes back on Sunday. Rodin is very friendly and shows her around the studio in the house, where she sees his watercolours, his colour paintings, and his complete disregard for conventions. She also glimpses his bleak and cramped living quarters. As if life was an afterthought. Work and more work: that was the advice of the Master to the Rilke couple—their mournful trumpet only sounded louder. Recounting all this to Otto, Paula quotes Rodin in her idiosyncratic French: ‘La travaille, c’est mon bonheur.’

  After five weeks in Paris, she returns to Worpswede: all of a sudden she has had enough of being far away.

  The winter of 1903 is harsh in northern Germany. Paula arrives to snow and storms. The tulip shoots have frozen, the fruit trees are damaged, little Elsbeth is cooped up in the house. But it is peaceful at home after her emotionally charged time in Paris. Elsbeth, known as Bettine, calls her Mother. Paula makes an effort to answer her countless questions. From the window, the two of them watch a couple of robins. They eat roasted apples, skate on the canals with the local children. A new servant, Lina, is taken on (but she has to be supervised…what a bore). Elsbeth gets the measles. Elsbeth learns to read. Elsbeth makes too much noise for her father—Paula escapes to the Brünjes’ studio. ‘A very stable, routine life’, punctuated by Otto’s fits of anxiety about his health. Lina spent sixty marks at various merchants! Fortunately the Modersohns could take it out of her salary.

  Paula sleeps at her studio when Otto is not around. She dines on boiled eggs and stewed fruit. Or simply pears and bread and cheese.13 She loves these dinners that are not really dinners, ‘not nearly enough to keep Otto alive’, no table to set, no cooking to do. The servant does that. She gets Lina to make Bierkaltschale, a dessert sweetened with beer, cream and cinnamon. Or else ‘rice pudding with quarters of stewed apples and raisins’. Paula paints these rustic or childish meals (today we might say ‘regressive’): dairy products in a beautiful blue-and-white enamelled plate. A Parisian baguette on a bright studiously folded tablecloth. Fried eggs, lots of apples, as many pears, a few cherries, lots of pumpkins, and a vase, a ceramic pot, a jug. These so-called still lifes are in fact alive and appetising. One delivery day she paints some bananas. She asks her sister in Italy to send her a branch from a lemon tree.

  And the joy of living alone: she reads while eating dinner. Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child by Bettina Brentano. She reads George Sand in French, her fascinating masculine liaisons, her style that ‘suffers a little from a lack of feminine restraint’. And she marvels at finding herself ‘happy almost every time Otto and I are apart’. She tells herself that she takes pleasure in thinking about him when he’s away. It’s when she becomes Paula Becker again. And that is pure joy.

  ‘Half of me is still Paula Becker, and the other half is acting as if it were.’

  A self-portrait signed with a strip of red capital letters, PAULA MODERSOHN. Portraits of women, her sisters or farming women. Of men, her brothers or farming men. Two large nudes of Madame M., round hips, drooping breasts, a calm, composed face, eyes almost closed. ‘The great and simple beauty of all that.’ She is searching. Digging, literally, into the material with the wood of her paintbrush. ‘There is something almost tactile for me in the application of paint.’ There is a depth and thickness to her work, layer after layer, a surface that is ‘rough and alive’, like old marble or sandstone that have been out in the air, exposed to the workings of weather and time.

  ‘Only one purpose occupies my thoughts, consciously and unconsciously.’ ‘Oh, to paint, paint, paint!’

  Otto’s journal:

  Paula paints, reads, plays the piano, et cetera. The household is also in very good hands—the only things lacking are her interest in the family and her relationship with the house. I hope they improve…Paula hates to be conventional and is now falling prey to the error of preferring to make everything angular, ugly, bizarre, wooden. Her colours are wonderful—but the form? The expression! Hands like spoons, noses like cobs, mouths lik
e wounds, faces like cretins. She lays it on too thick…It is difficult to give her advice, as usual.

  On holidays in the Frisian Islands in the summer of 1903, Paula writes a joyful letter to her family, in which she describes Otto in the toilet, writhing with cramps, calling for toilet paper, toilet paper, quickly!

  That’s what it’s like now, daily life, the routine of their marriage.

  In the garden, around the house, she has planted rose bushes, tulips, carnations, anemones. She waters, weeds, has dirty fingernails. She constructs garden edging and paths, plants dense flower beds, imagines secluded corners with little benches. If the flowers are fragile, she stakes them with colourful strips of material. From Meudon she brings the idea of an unstructured mass of green. She does not want a German garden. She even erects arbours, which she describes to her Aunt Marie as ‘cosy and comical’, one under a large elderberry bush, another under a stand of birches; gourds will grow on another one. In the centre of the garden she places a huge glass globe, which appears, strange and magical, in some of her paintings.

  Otto collects stuffed birds. He lives among stuffed seagulls, owls, herons, ducks, storks. In an aquarium there is a crab, a carp and a white dace, a salamander and water spiders. ‘And a goldfish bowl with charming occupants, and a tree-frog couple.’ Paula will paint red goldfish à la Matisse, but ten years before Matisse. She describes Otto in the evening: ‘happy to smoke his pipe’; he uses ‘life only as a rest from his art’.

  They spend the summer of 1904 in Fischerhude, about fifteen kilometres from their house. Another artists’ village, flatter than Worpswede, and almost as much of a tourist destination; today the Otto Modersohn Museum can be found here.14 The hostel they stayed in has now become a chic hotel. The Vogelers are there with them, as well as Paula’s sister, Milly, and her husband. Boating parties, swimming in the rivers, Isadora Duncan–style dancing; Otto plays the flute. And nudism. Breakfast naked by the water’s edge. Frau Vogeler was not present, Otto notes in his journal.