Decades before movie star Demi Moore posed for Vanity Fair, proudly naked and protuberantly pregnant, German expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker was painting her enceinte self in the buff. It was a shocking subject for any artist in the first decade of the 1900s, let alone a woman. “I am Me, and hope to become that more and more,” she scribbled to a friend, writer Rainer Maria Rilke, in 1906. A year later, aged thirty-one, she was dead, felled by a postpartum complication days after giving birth to her first child and leaving behind a legacy of some seven hundred works that she had produced in only seven years. Bold in execution (often rough and chalky in effect, with crusty impasto), they are also succulent, the depth-charge tints (jade greens, rose pinks, sky blues) recalling a formative exposure to Paul Cézanne.
Staged through September 9 at Manhattan’s Neue Galerie, in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago, where it will travel, Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich bin Ich / I am Me is the inaugural American salute to an artist whose brilliant career, as for so many women, was frustrated by outside forces, namely an artist husband who saw his wife’s adventuresome genius as a threat to his own renown. (“Marriage does not make one happier,” she wrote. “It takes away the illusion that had sustained a deep belief in a kindred soul.”) Another obstacle was motherhood, which she felt had come too soon, thanks to an infant stepdaughter left in her care. At her easel, though, Modersohn-Becker escaped into ecstasy, so engrossed in her canvases that she gleefully described one all-nighter as resulting in “a giant bear of a hangover,” in a collection of vivacious letters and journal entries that was published in 1983. As much for her dynamic brushwork and depth-charge palette as for her unclothed portraits, she has been called the first modern woman artist.
“The language of her canvases is simple, sober, strict, astringent, almost tight-fisted,” Günter Busch, a German museum director, once wrote, “yet in every one of her works there is also, even in a hidden way, a human warmth, a heartfelt quality, and love.” That quote leads one to expect an underlying sentimentality in Modersohn-Becker’s work, but straightforward honesty is more to her point, with a dash of melancholy. Consider, for instance, the Neue Galerie’s marquee image, Self-Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand. Painted months before Modersohn-Becker’s demise, it shows the artist dressed in blue, with a prominent nose, ruddy cheeks, and an appraising expression, obviously studying her face in a mirror and finding the likeness to be a fair one. A thick-fingered left hand grasps two aster-like blossoms, one red and one pink, while, almost out of sight at the bottom of the canvas, her painting hand rests on her pregnant belly. A maternal gesture, perhaps, but, given her bracing directness, it could be merely practical: where else would she place her hand as she studied herself? Or could it be a premonition? “I know that I shall not live very long,” Modersohn-Becker once wrote. “But I wonder, is that sad? Is a celebration more beautiful because it lasts longer? And my life is a celebration, a short, intense celebration.”
Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich bin Ich / I am Me • Neue Galerie, New York • to September 9 • neue galerie.org
