Hugo Erfurth, a photographer there to immortalise Otto, takes a few photographs of the child’s mother: Paula, sunk into the pillow, her face misshapen, visibly marked by her recent ordeal, is smiling. The baby is either in tears or asleep.
Eighteen days later, Paula is finally allowed to get up. A little party is organised. She asks for a mirror at the end of her bed, braids her hair into a crown, pins some roses to her housecoat. The house is overflowing with flowers and candles; everything is lit up. Paula stands, and then falls to the floor. She dies of an embolism, from lying down too long. As she collapses, she says, ‘Schade.’ Her last word. ‘A pity.’
I have written this little biography because of this final word. Because it was a pity. Because I miss this woman I never knew. Because I would have liked her to live. I want to show her paintings, speak about her life. I want to do her more than justice: I want to bring her being-there, splendour.
And I know that I speak for another dead person, but his turn will come; the dead come back. I will write his short life. He was my brother and his name was Jean; he lived for two days. But the time has not yet come for that.
How short your life…28 So I went back and forth to Bremen, taking advantage of a conference, a lecture, a documentary. (Arte, the European culture channel, had invited me to travel to the landmarks in the life of Arno Schmidt, my other ‘favourite German’. His moorlands were close to those of Worpswede.) I even bundled my whole family into a camper van over summer. It was nice weather in northern Germany. We met Germans and Polish people who asked us, laughing, what we were doing there, heading in the wrong direction, our backs to the warm seas. We drifted from painting to painting.
Clara has Otto’s letter in her hands. She comes quickly; she comes to the grave. What else could she do? And the news finds Rilke in Venice, in the pleasant company of Mimi Romanelli. He cuts short his trip and writes to Mimi, in French, without explicitly mentioning Paula: ‘There is death in life…I’m not ashamed, Dear one, to have cried for another Sunday, too early in the morning, in the cold gondola that kept going, and going, forever…It is once and always death that endures within me, works on me, transforms my heart, increases the vitality of my blood…’
Exactly one year after Paula’s death, on All Saints’ Day 1908, over three haunted nights in Paris, Rilke writes ‘Requiem for a Friend’. He is at the Hotel Biron, 77 rue de Varenne, a building Clara located for him and which will become the Musée Rodin. To another woman he loves, Sidonie Nádherný, Rilke describes the fever that possessed him: ‘I wrote and I finished, without being aware of the remarkable connection to the date itself, a requiem for someone… who died a year ago: a woman who was snatched away from remarkable beginnings in her artistic life, first of all by her family, and then by an unlucky fate, and an impersonal death, a death for which, in life, she had not prepared.’
I delayed my re-reading of ‘Requiem’ until the very end of this biography. Once I began, my skull became the chamber in which the chords resonated. To read this text is to listen to it. The translations are musical and varied, and in the course of my research I learned how to hear the German language. Ich habe Tote…
Rilke is not my favourite writer. He is not Kafka, his contemporary. I do not know how Kafka wrote what he wrote. Whereas with Rilke I see his problems, his successes, his triumphs, his pettiness. I see his work, excellent work, and difficult too. I can say to myself that we work, as it were, in the same studio.
But Paula was his equal in the studio. She was perhaps the only woman whom he thought of like that, with whom he fought and whom he loved as an equal.
But he does not name her. Would Paula have been too familiar? Then what name? Neither Becker, nor Modersohn, neither the father, nor the husband…‘To a Friend.’ Rilke had so many women friends. And so many dead women friends. Rilke has his dead, Ich habe Tote, but she is the only one to ‘be there’. The only one to come back. And for the first time he uses a familiar form of address.
Understand that you are here. I understand.
As a blind man encircles with his touch
The surface of things and understand—I feel
your fate
And cannot name it.
Let us grieve together…29
He recounts the death simply, as Otto described it to Clara: the mirror, doing her hair. He despises the death inflicted on Paula, a death that was not hers. He despises this premature death, a death that steals life.30 And he blames ‘grown men’, who assume the right to possess, when nothing can and nothing must hold back ‘the woman who does not see us anymore, who walks away from us as by a miracle, on a narrow strip of her being’.
So you died the way women used to die in the old days, you died an old-fashioned death in the warm house, the death of women in childbirth who want to close themselves up and are no longer able to, because that obscure darkness they have given birth to along with the child returns, clamorous, and enters them.31
When I wrote The Baby in 2001, I was already quoting from Rilke, but I did not know Paula Modersohn-Becker, and I did not know that I missed her.
A thought here for Otto, two young wives, twice widowed, twice left a father with a little girl needing her mother and milk.
Elsbeth and Mathilde, the two little girls, the two half-sisters, the two old ladies, finished their lives together in Bremen. They both had jobs in welfare and health care.
In Wuppertal I remember the hands of the curator, how he handled the paintings gently, turning them around for me. We were in the basement: the nineteen paintings by Paula held by the museum were all at that time in storage.
The little girl with the black hat, the little girl with her hand on her chest, a large seated peasant woman, the still life with red fish, a mother and child in which the baby is holding an orange, a beautiful still life with a pumpkin, the little girl with the rabbit in her arms…As the curator turned the painting around another little girl appeared; Paula had reused the canvas. Twenty paintings rather than nineteen.
All along the walls and metal racks, under the low ceiling, in the neon lighting: it was a cold exhibition on the grey cement floor, but it was also intimate, and the light and air and the daylight would bring the paintings back to life.
Paula was a ‘courageous and combative’ woman. That is how, nine years after her death, Rilke described her in a long letter to Mathilde, her mother, on 26 December 1916. He adds that these two words reveal nothing, however, of the Paula he knew. And that the letters her mother wants to publish do not reveal anything about her either. He talks about how genuine she was, and about her grace. He says that, during the last year of her life, the year ‘of her new life’, Paula knew or only wanted to know two things: ‘work and fate’. And then he says a very simple thing: that, at the end of her life, Paula had developed ‘an extraordinary personal style’.
We work and we are bodies. Later Rilke wrote some rather narrow-minded things about the choice women have to make between having children and being creative—this ‘fate’. As a woman and an artist, and a woman who gave birth in the 2000s, I am grateful for advances in medicine, which now significantly reduce the impact of ‘fate’—that extremely common complication of pulmonary embolism.
Paula’s loving mother disregarded Rilke’s reservations and published a selection of letters, which present her daughter as a young German woman, an artistic heroine, a romantic lover. These letters were a huge publishing success in Germany: about fifteen reprints and 50,000 copies sold between the two wars.32 When Rilke comes across them in 1923 and re-reads them, overwhelmed, it is because the cleaner in the castle where he is staying received them as a Christmas present. The manuscript of Paula’s journal and some of her letters disappeared during World War II, but other manuscripts were recovered and the whole lot collected and re-edited in German, and in two American university editions.
In Germany today you can find the work of Paula Modersohn-Becker on postcards, magnets, posters. Her pictures are shown to s
choolchildren. She has her own museum in Bremen. Posterity came to her quickly: ‘And now it is the same people who are generating a sort of celebrity for her work,’ wrote Rilke to Sidonie Nádherný on 8 November 1908. ‘The same people who obstructed her, held her back from her solitude, from her progress.’ But what did Rilke do for Paula’s posterity, by never referring to her by name?33 Otto handled her legacy, Hoetger became her champion, and in 1938 Vogeler bravely devoted an article to her in an anti-Nazi magazine.
She was soon included in numerous group shows, rubbing shoulders with Ensor, Klee, Moll, Kokoschka, Matisse. Her first solo exhibition was in Bremen in 1908, after which the exhibitions continued without a break. Many German museums and private collectors bought her works by the job lot. And Ludwig Roselius built Paula her own museum.
Roselius was a Bremen philanthropist who made a huge fortune by inventing decaffeinated coffee in 1906. He bought a whole section of Böttcherstrasse in the historic district of Bremen, and handed over the plans to Hoetger. The Paula Becker-Modersohn House opened its doors in 1927. Originally, Roselius wanted to call it the Paula Becker House. Both austere and cheerful, full of curves and ingenious features, a brick bonbon, the house was the first museum in the world devoted to a female artist. It is still there, rebuilt identically after being destroyed during the war, and Böttcherstrasse is the tourist hub of Bremen.
In 1937 the Nazis ‘purged’ German museums of seventy paintings by Paula. Many were destroyed, others sold; some were displayed as ‘degenerate art’—a credit to the paintings. The Nazis had a problem with this young woman artist who did not follow the program of ‘children, kitchen, church’. Hoetger and Roselius had an unusual, provocative tribute inscribed on the façade of her museum in gold letters beneath the figure of an angel armed with a sword: ‘In honour of the work of a noble woman. Her work continues to shine, victorious, while the heroic reputations of brave men are extinguished.’ The Nazis wanted to erase the inscription. Roselius agreed to a compromise with them and changed one word only: he replaced ‘while’ with ‘until’. After the war, ‘while’ was reinstated.
Why is she only known in Germany? Why has her city, Paris, never had an exhibition of her work?34 She is German, of course, but no more so than Picasso is Spanish or Modigliani Italian. Does the fact that her life’s work was not completed constitute such an insurmountable obstacle? Or do we have to assume that the fact she was a woman stopped her at the border? Do we have to assume that she did not have her universal visa?
In ‘Requiem’, Rilke cursed the yellow amber necklace. What was left of Paula in the heaviness of the beads?
I was walking in the Worpswede house, a red velvet rope between me and a dresser, a few plates and her last painting, displayed dramatically on an easel. I was thinking about Dostoyevsky’s house in St Petersburg, about his hat and his umbrella, about the electrical wires under the desk to charge the fake candles. I was thinking about the James Joyce Martello Tower in Dublin, about the fictional blue teapot, about the cups. About Arno Schmidt’s house at Bargfeld, about the desk frozen as it was on the day of his death, about his glasses, about the tin of coffee in the kitchen, the last coffee he had in his life.
Objects that have become like holograms, still present, but which have disappeared with the hands that gave substance to them. So this is how they live on, the objects belonging to our dead—heartbreaking and stupid. If Paula’s necklace has survived her somewhere, can we see her looking at us, like an insect, through the amber?
Paula is here, with her pictures. We are going to see her.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wrote this biography while Julia Garimorth, Fabrice Hergott and I prepared the Paula Modersohn-Becker retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, which was held from April to August 2016: a spring and a summer for Paula, one hundred years after her last trip to Paris. It was my gesture of love to her: to write about her, to show her work.
I would also like to thank Michel Vincent of the French-German Cultural Centre of Essen, for his oral translations, for his friendly management skills, and for reading my text.
Diane Radycki, for her invitation to New York, for our invaluable correspondence, and for reading my text. And thank you to Monica Strauss for her hospitality.
Susanne Gerlach of Böttcherstrasse in Bremen, for her wonderful hospitality.
Wolfang Werner, an inexhaustible mine of information on Paula.
Verena Borgmann.
Guillaume Faroult.
Sylvain Amic.
Hella Faust.
Anna Frera.
Hanna Boghanim.
Stéphane Guégan.
Jean-Marc Terrasse.
Emiliano Grossman.
Frank Laukötter.
Élisabeth Lebovici.
Emmanuelle Touati.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
All quotations from Paula’s journals and letters are from Paula Modersohn-Becker: The Letters and Journals, edited by Günter Busch and Liselotte von Reinken, and edited and translated from the German by Arthur S. Wensinger and Carole Clew Hoey, Northwestern University Press, 1998.
Paula Modersohn-Becker, Werkverzeichnis der Gemälde, catalogue raisonné, edited by Günter Busch and Wolfgang Werner, Hirmer Verlag, 1998.
Paula Modersohn-Becker Briefwechsel mit Rainer Maria Rilke, Insel-Bücherei no. 1242, 2011. Correspondence between Paula and Rilke.
Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 1892–1910, translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton, W. W. Norton & Company, 1945.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, translated by M.D. Herter Norton, W. W. Norton & Company, 1993.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Diaries of a Young Poet, translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler, W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.
The Collected Works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Pergamon Media, 2015.
Diane Radycki, Paula Modersohn-Becker: The First Modern Woman Artist, Yale University Press, 2013.
Eric Torgersen, Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker, Northwestern University Press, 1998.
Ralph Freedman, Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke, Northwestern University Press, 1998.
Maïa Brami, Paula Becker: La Peinture Faite Femme, Éditions de l’Amandier, 2015.
Correspondence addressee à Hayashi Tadamasa, sous la direction de Brigitte Koyama-Richard, Kokushokankôdai, Institut de Tokyo, 2001.
Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne, Penguin, 2006.
Knut Hamsun, Pan, Penguin, 1998.
Émile Zola, The Collected Works, Halycon Classics, 2010.
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House and Other Plays, Penguin, 2016.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Oxford World Classics, 2008.
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, Oxford World Classics, 2008.
There are various catalogues and illustrated art books on Paula’s work, including that by Averil King (Paula Modersohn-Becker, Antique Collector’s Club, 2009). Most are published in Germany. The most recent I know of is the catalogue of the 2014 exhibition at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, which includes the article by Tine Colstrup, ‘Venus of Worpswede’. Several biographies exist in German, including that by Rainer Stamm, Ein kurzes intensives Fest—Paula Modersohn-Becker, Reclam-Verlag, 2007.
Siân Reynolds, ‘Comment peut-on être femme sculpteur en 1900? Autour de quelques élèves de Rodin’, Persée, 1998, www.persee.fr, with the quotation from Kathleen Kennet (Self-Portrait of an Artist: From the diaries and memoirs of Lady Kennet, Kathleen, Lady Scott, Murray, 1949).
Denise Noël, ‘Les Femmes peintres dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle’, https://clio.revues.org/646, 2004, which includes the quote on p. 69 by Sophie Schaeppi from her diary of 1892.
NOTES
I
1. The Académie Julian, where Marie Bashkirtseff was a student, was also mixed, the only difference being that the boys and girls were separated for the classes with naked models. For some reason, enrolment in all classes cost twice as m
uch for girls as it did for boys.
2. Thanks to the persistence of the sculptor Hélène Bertaux and the painter Virginie Demont-Breton.
II
3. When Paula read it she thought it contained ‘more about Rilke than about Worpswede’. (9 March 1903)
4. From Rilke’s Diaries of a Young Poet, translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler, W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.
5. Lou was of Russian-Huguenot origin.
6. From ‘Death Fugue’, by Paul Celan, 1945, translated by Michael Hamburger. Penguin Classics, 1996. On the death of a friend of Clara’s, Rilke wrote: ‘It was your destiny, Marguerite, to die very young, and to die blonde…’
7. Which will result in Rilke’s Notes on the Melody of Things.
8. ‘Wenn de Bom ist hoch, ist de Planter dot.’
9. Rilke found writing difficult, so he wrote letters more than anything else.
10. W.G. Sebald, ‘Max Ferber’, The Emigrants, translated by Michael Hulse, Harvill Press, 1997, p.181.
III
11. Rilke recalled that Clara’s first sculpture teacher (the sculptor Max Klinger) ‘took the trouble to show her the whole incredibly painful path that lies between a young girl and success’.
12. Introduced by William II, this slogan rose to prominence at the end of the nineteenth century and was championed during the Third Reich.
IV
13. This reminds me of the favourite meal of another walker and lover of pears, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. ‘Give me any dairy products, eggs, herbs, cheese, brown bread, and tolerable wine, and I’m bound to be happy.’
14. He began a new life there after the death of Paula. Clara Westhoff and Ruth also came to live in Fischerhude; Clara died here in 1954.
15. Müller was Danish. In 1918, the German Federation of Naturism was founded, the first in the world. The Scandinavians then founded a similar federation. Amrun Island, in the Frisian Islands, where Paula went swimming, rain, hail or shine, is still one of the biggest naturism centres in Europe.
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