When Paula paints nudes a century after Constance Mayer, no one dreams of rebuking her for her immodesty. She was able to learn anatomy without having to go into hiding, and she was not alone: the female students of the art academies she attends, as well as her contemporary Suzanne Valadon, all work on nudes. But to go from there to painting herself nude…
Her most famous self-portrait, the one people talk about when they talk about her, is at the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen. She is naked to the waist, standing three-quarters on, with a big amber necklace and small pointed breasts. Her belly is swollen. Four or five months pregnant. Although she was not in the habit of writing on the back of her canvases, here we find these words: ‘I painted this at the age of thirty, on my sixth wedding anniversary, PB.’
But the dates are impossible to determine. On 25 May 1906, Paula was not pregnant. A month earlier, she was specifically explaining to Otto that a child was not on the cards now, and not with him. And yet here she is holding her belly in that proud and protective gesture that many pregnant women have.
The Modersohn-Becker experts, all thirty of them, debate the issue. They bring up her diet. Too much cabbage and too many potatoes. The self-portrait of a bloated woman: care for a bit more soup? But she could just as easily have been imagining herself pregnant. Making a game of sticking out her belly, arching her back, her navel protruding. Just to see. The self-portrait as auto-fiction. She paints herself as she would like to be, and as she imagines herself: she paints an image of herself. Beautiful, happy, a little bit playful.
And, take note: it is the first time. The first time that a woman has painted herself naked.
The gesture of taking her clothes off and setting up in front of her canvas and going ahead and doing it: here is my skin, I’m going to show my belly, and the shape of my breasts, and my navel…The nude self-portrait of a woman, one on one with herself and the history of art.23
Is it because models are expensive? Is it deliberate? This healthy, sporty, pretty, well-rounded, nudist German woman loved her body. The act of painting herself naked has nothing to do with narcissism; it is work. It is all there for her to do. Using either a mirror or a photograph. All there for her to discover. I don’t know if she is aware of it: of being the first one to do it. In any case, she always looks happy naked.
Rilke, ‘Requiem for a Friend’:
For that is what you understood: ripe fruits.
You set them before the canvas, in white bowls,
and weighed out each one’s heaviness with your
colours.
Women too, you saw, were fruits; and children,
moulded from inside,
into the shapes of their existence.
And at last you saw yourself as a fruit,
you stepped out of your clothes and brought
your naked body before the mirror, and you
let yourself inside,
down to your gaze, which remained strong, and
didn’t say: This is me, instead: This is.24
Two mysterious photographs show Paula naked to the waist. They date from around the same time, summer 1906. They are studies for two naked self-portraits with amber necklace, full-frontal, proto-Cubist. She is wearing a crown of daisies. Her hands are curved into tulip shapes, one holding a piece of fruit, the other raised near her shoulder. Such strength. And she’s smiling.
Mysterious photographs, because we do not know who took them. The mood is calm, certainly intimate, and serious, studious: this is a work session. Paula’s gaze is confident, attentive, serene.
An audacious hypothesis attributes the photograph to Rilke.25 But I find it difficult to imagine those two, with their mannered, formal way of addressing each other, with their avoidance of sex (apart from flirtation)—I find it hard to imagine them, her naked, him clothed, snap. But it’s a nice theory. Rilke and Paula were both intense in their approach to life. Both knew what they were looking for and what they wanted: to write, paint, find a place where they could be alone to create. Both had fled their marriages at exactly the same time, maintaining that no one could demand of them, in the name of any sort of convention, that they deviate from their respective paths.26 So, perhaps, between these two artists, these two friends, a photo like that was possible after all.
The official version, from the catalogue raisonné, suggests that the photograph was taken by Paula’s sister, Herma. In which case, in 1906, the young governess would have had to own a camera—a very expensive item. Others think the photograph was taken by Werner Sombart, the bearded sociologist Paula met at the Hauptmanns in January 1906, and who was supposedly Paula’s lover, having caught up with her briefly in Paris. But then, why not one of the Bulgarians? Paula painted a beautiful portrait of Sombart, but not of her handsome Bulgarian, whose face we will never know.
And this photograph could simply have been taken by Otto. But there again it is hard to imagine this unhappy couple finding a peaceful moment to take a photograph like this one.
We are left with these images of her: her imprint on photosensitive material in the summer of 1906. Her, for real, her pointed breasts, her broad belly, her rounded shoulders, the flicker of a smile, and the dark amber on her white skin.
Paris, 3 September 1906. The second attempt by Otto to reclaim his wife.
Dear Otto,
You’re arriving soon. Now I must ask you, for your sake and mine, please spare both of us this ordeal. Let me go, Otto. I do not want you as my husband. I do not want it. Accept this fact. Don’t torture yourself any longer. Try to let go of the past. I ask you to arrange all other things according to your wishes and desires. If you still enjoy having my paintings, then pick out those you wish. Please do not take any further steps to bring us back together. It would only prolong the torment. I must still ask you to send money, one final time. I am asking you for the sum of five hundred marks. I am going to the country for a while now, so please send it to B. Hoetger, 108 rue du Vaugirard. During this time I intend to take steps to secure my livelihood. I thank you for all the goodness I have had from you. There is nothing else I can do. Your Paula Modersohn.
On 9 September, another letter.
Dear Otto,
My harsh letter was written during a time when I was terribly upset. I had heard in Basel that you never told my mother the reasons for our discord, when it was your duty to do so. And then I saw, in Kurt’s letters, that you blamed me for your nervous state, when that is—categorically—not the case. You told me yourself that the same thing happened on your honeymoon with Hélène. Also my wish not to have a child by you was only for the moment, and groundless…I am sorry now for having written it. If you have not completely given up on me, then come here soon, so that we can try to find one another again. The sudden shift in the way I feel will seem strange to you. Poor little creature that I am, I can’t tell which path is the right one for me. All these things have overtaken me, and yet I still do not feel guilty. I don’t want to cause pain to any of you.
16 September. Paula and Otto are at the stage of talking about bedding arrangements. Should she rent a room for him, or a studio, and does he intend to send bed linen ahead of time, and if so could he add a quilt for her, the tartan one she likes.
The Modersohn-Beckers stay six months in Paris. And, however it happened, Paula is pregnant in March 1907.
In November 1906, a painting by Paula, probably Girl with Black Hat, is exhibited at the Bremen Art Museum as part of a group show. Her mother, who does not hold back from saying how she has never been able to stand this portrait, sends her two press clippings: ‘a fanfare!’ Gustav Pauli, the director of the museum, recalls ‘the cruel treatment meted out to this extremely gifted artist’ in 1899. She has, he says, ‘an enormously developed sense of colour’. He fears that her ‘serious and powerful talent will not find many friends among the public at large. She lacks nearly everything that is needed to win hearts and flatter the casual and untutored glance…Whoever might choose to see Paul
a Modersohn’s Head of a Young Girl as ugly, and then brutally decide to subject it to his scorn, can safely count on the smug approval of many readers.’
If not joy, this review brings a degree of satisfaction to Paula. She sends it to her sister Milly, who is more middle-class, more religious, more married, and explains that true joy is a secret thing and is found in solitude. She apologises that she is not able to speak to her about her art. She scolds her for wishing for a baby boy when the two of them were born female and fabulous. She describes the trinkets she has bought with the money Milly sent—a pair of wonderful old combs, and a pair of old shoe buckles. Otto? ‘The man is touching in his love.’ ‘I will be grateful for the portion of love I have received. If one can only remain healthy and not die too young.’
For her thirty-first birthday, Paula receives, again from Milly, a gold coin and a brooch; from her mother, a bracelet; from Elsbeth, a drawing of some potatoes and a windmill; from Otto, a white shawl and a book on the Fayum mummy portraits. And from Frau Hauptmann, an enormous iced cake, as a token of their reconciliation. And, as it happens, the Hauptmanns decide to visit the reunited couple in Paris.
She writes to Rilke, complaining that over the last few months in Paris she hasn’t done anything: ‘Just don’t expect anything from me. Otherwise I’ll probably disappoint you, because it may still be a long time before I am somebody.’
On 9 March 1907, she writes to her mother and Milly, telling them she is pregnant, but asks them not to say a word to anyone.
As she is leaving Paris, Paula writes to Clara: ‘This past summer I realised that I am not the sort of woman to stand alone in life…The main thing now is peace and quiet for my work, and I have that most of all when I am at Otto Modersohn’s side.’ She leaves her furniture in storage with her landlady and asks Rilke to sell whatever he can’t use.
And it’s while looking at some watercolours by Cézanne, two months later, that Rilke suddenly remembers: he didn’t deal with the furniture!
It’s frightful, unbelievable, that I could have forgotten such a thing…I hope that my slip-up is not too serious. Should I sell everything, wouldn’t that be simpler? I’ve forgotten the number of the building, which means I can’t do anything. Do I need to go there? I’m afraid I’ve been very stupid. Let me know, and, if possible, reassure me.
These are the last letters the two friends exchange, four letters about furniture, paraphernalia, the sort of encumbrance that always seems to be between them. And such annoying questions. Yes, she writes back to him, it is actually ‘a little bit bad of you to have forgotten my furniture’. The address is easy: 49 boulevard du Montparnasse, at the Académie Vitti. If a second-hand dealer is interested, Rilke should sell the lot and convert it into something beautiful, a mother-of-pearl brooch, for example, like the one she lost in Paris. Or else a brass table bell, in the shape of a lady. Or else some photographic reproductions of Gauguin’s paintings—you can get them at Drouet’s, 114 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. Anyway, could he send her the catalogue of the Salon d’Automne, with the Cézannes. Because, alas, she will not be able to get there.
Nothing about a child on the way, apart from the mention of the trip she can’t undertake.
Rilke locates the furniture, but the owners of the Académie Vitti have left for the summer holidays. It is impossible for Rilke to gain entrance as the concierge is so intransigent. ‘The capital value will remain the same, it won’t increase, and let us hope it does not decrease either. As soon as I have time, I’ll deal with this business again and send you a report.’ Especially as she really has left everything there for him to deal with, which he discovers when the academy reopens: mattress, bed base, two tables, two chairs, a large mirror, and a whole lot of smaller items.
At the end of October, Rilke ‘spends his whole time at the Vittis’ studio’. It turns out no one actually wants any of this furniture. Every small-time secondhand dealer just shrugged, and even at half-price the concierge won’t have a bar of it. ‘And in the end—catastrophe.’ Madame Vitti sells the studio. He has to clear the decks. Since he can’t really leave everything out on the footpath, he decides to give the furniture to a model, and the mattress to the concierge. And since, after all, the whole thing is his fault, he offers Paula twenty francs as compensation. As for buying her something, he won’t have the time: he could be ‘leaving from one day to the next’. He does send her the Salon d’Automne catalogue. ‘Live well and make some allowances for your devoted RM Rilke.’
They are his last words to Paula.
The same week he writes a letter to Clara that prefigures his Elegies, like an antibiography, what silence would aspire to, if silence could describe life:
Alas, we count the years and make divisions here and there and stop and begin again and hesitate between the two. But how very much of one piece is what befalls us, in a relationship how one thing compares to another, has given birth to itself and grows up and is brought up to itself, and we in reality have only to exist, simply, ardently, as the earth exists, assenting to the years, light and dark and altogether in space, not desiring to be at rest in anything save in the net of influences and forces in which the stars feel themselves secure.
Being here, splendour.
Paula is pregnant in her 1907 self-portrait. From March onwards, she is certainly pregnant in her self-portraits, but in the most famous self-portrait we simply surmise it. She gazes out at us: serious, a touch mocking, her cheeks the same rose colour as the two flowers held in her characteristic way, and her other hand resting high on the curve of her belly, on the contour of the sphere.
In another self-portrait, pregnant, she is naked to the waist, more front-on, more stylised: she has represented herself in a fresco-like composition between two caryatids. A round belly, a wreath of flowers on her head, an amber necklace, a goblet of fruit in one hand, an orange in the other. She seems content, a little mischievous. One of the caryatids looks fed up, the other is jeering. Technically, this is the first pregnant, naked self-portrait in the history of art, but all we have left of it is a black-and-white photograph: it was destroyed in an air-raid on 24 June 1943, along with part of the Van der Heydts’ collection in their family home.
Is Paula herself aware that no other painter, no other female painter, has ever represented herself pregnant? She seems to paint so ‘spontaneously’, according to the rhythm of life and of the canvas, with an eye that Rilke describes as ‘poor’, a naked eye, but also including in her gaze Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Le Douanier Rousseau, as well as past Impressionism and future Cubism.27 She paints what she sees in front of her: that being-there, that presence in the world, which happens to be pregnant. During the same years, 1903 and then 1907, Klimt’s portraits of a very pregnant and very naked woman cause a scandal. The title of the paintings is Hope. In the first portrait, skeletons surround the future mother.
The only photograph of me on the walls of my home is a portrait by Kate Barry, an artist and woman I liked a lot. In black and white, in a slightly Madonna-like halo, in my kitchen, I am six months pregnant.
At the time, I often offered it to journalists when they asked me for an author photo. It was rejected every time. The answer was always the same: ‘We’d like a normal photo.’
To her sister Herma, on 8 October: ‘Thank you for the layette. I’m painting again, and if I only had a magic cape to make me disappear, my wish would be to go on and on painting.’
To her sister Milly, sometime in October: ‘“Why, the kid knocked me right off the chair!” I’m feeling the same way. All of you must be nice and patient with me; otherwise he, or she, is going to get all frantic, too. And don’t ever write me another postcard with words like “nappies” or “blessed event”. You know me well enough to realise that I’m the type who prefers to keep the fact that I’m about to be preoccupied with nappies away from other people.’
To Clara, on 19 October: ‘My mind has been much occupied these days by the thought of Cézanne, of how he is
one of the three or four powerful artists who affected me like a thunderstorm, like some great event. Do you still remember what we saw at Vollard’s in 1900? And then, during the final days of my last stay in Paris, those truly astonishing early paintings of his at the Galerie Pellerin. Tell your husband he should try to see the pictures there. Pellerin has a hundred and fifty Cézannes. I saw only a few, but they are magnificent. My urge to know everything about the Salon d’Automne was so great that a few days ago I asked him to send me at least the catalogue. Please come soon and bring the letters [about Cézanne]. Come right away, Monday if you can possibly make it, for I hope soon, finally, to be otherwise occupied. If it were not absolutely necessary for me to be here right now, nothing could keep me away from Paris.’
To her mother, on 22 October: ‘I would so love to go to Paris for a week. Fifty-five Cézannes are on exhibit there now!’
Mathilde Modersohn is born on 2 November 1907. It is a very difficult birth that lasts for two days and ends with chloroform and forceps. The doctor orders Paula to stay in bed to recover.
Paula’s mother is happy, especially after ‘the nightmare of last year’. The baby has her name, Mathilde. From mother to daughter, another daughter is born. Her letters are like poetic idylls: ‘Paula reclines on snow-white pillows beneath her beloved Gauguins and Rodins. The winter sun laughs in through the little white tufted curtains, and red geraniums on the windowsill smile at her.’
And I would like to think that Paula is happy too; I want to believe that this baby girl brought her immense joy.
Being Here Page 8