Paula Modersohn-Becker, the remarkable late Expressionist painter from Germany, who was active during the end of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century, died at the age of 31, in November 1907. The artist’s work, a marvelous compilation of self-exploration (many of her works were self-portraits), ruminations on the female gender, and portraits of other well-known persons, such as the great poet Rilke, whom Modersohn-Becker was friends with, all evinced strong feeling but, at the same time, a mystical reserve. Somehow, the paintings communicate a hushed stillness, a pervasive melancholy. The works leave a palpable atmosphere, in which the
practice of the visual takes on a strongly poetic, if also a slightly late 19th century turn. Some of the works describe the countenances of people; other works beautifully study the landscape. Modersohn-Becker also painted many portraits including the well-known artist Rilke. Modersohn-Becker kept her eye on the art milieu she belonged to, but she was also watching over the general public, whose involvement in the artist’s world was important. If we look at Rilke’s portrait, his face is nearly a mask, intensified by colors: dark brown hair; reddish lips; a very pale face, accented by a pale, pinkish-red circle around each eye; and a brown mustache and goatee. High white collars add a seriousness of purpose, while the pure black eyes show no iris, giving Rilke’s face a slightly frightening otherworldliness. Somehow the greatness of Rilke’s poetry is communicated; its abstract intensities, along with a wild longing, can be seen in the writer’s features.
Modersohn-Becker was an artist interested in the internal life–of the person, of the work. The Expressionists, artists given to the revelations of visionary intention, with an emphasis on strong feeling, were perfect figures for Mode rsohn-Becker’s interest in the way her subjects lived their lives. Rilke, considered one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, comes across as propheticallymagnetic in his ghostly force. This is evident is his remarkable self-presence, surely a sign of his strength as an artist.
But it is also true that Modersohn-Becker felt called to examine herself, in which her romantic, feminine creativity might be symbolized by a small garland of flowers: what look like a rose and a tulip in the wonderful self-descriptive painting called Self-Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Hand (1907), in which a somber view of the painter, with pale color in her cheeks, is portrayed as a person of high seriousness. It is clear that Modersohn-Becker loved art, and was equally interested i n a woman’s outlook— albeit one that evaded excessive decoration and preferred seriousness without yielding to gender assertion (that would come later in culture). This self-portrait presents the artist as a striking nude, in which the she is wearing an amber necklace. The composition shows a pensive person holding two small flowers in her hands. Her short, squat body is striking if not overly alluring, but it is her face that is most interesting. The smile is marked by sadness, yet it is, even so, a smile that touches upon gladness despite the image’s melancholy. In this painting and others, the complexity of Modersohn-Becker leads to emotional measure and restraint—qualities in keeping with the high calling of poetry and emotive paintings.
As a major figure on the cusp of two centuries, Modersohn-Becker belonged to the period just before the arrival of Picasso and cubism, the basis of modern art. (Expressionism would last through the years between the two world wars.) As a product of Northern Europe, a place of cold weather and philosophy, perhaps surprisingly the movement was based on feeling. Modersohn-Becker’s art was surely a vehicle for emotion, influenced by spiritual powers that imbued the atmosphere with a melancholy and a ghostly ambience.
It is true that Modersohn-Becker was extremely beautiful in her youth; her bright eyes, luminous skin, and vivacious outlook are all available in a self-portrait done in1897/98. The artist’s beauty is immediately apparent. By concentrating, in a highly regular fashion, the subtle changes in countenance and physique over time, Modersoh-Becker portrayed, in both a cosmetic and soulful means, the transitory nature of beauty. In a similar fashion, her audience is very much aware of the limited lifespan Modersohn-Becker seemed to intuit herself. The flowers the artist holds in several compositions feel like warnings of mortality; indeed, they represent a moment, in which the image cannot override the idea of a longer lifespan.
Yet that does not mean, necessarily, that the association would have to be morbid or deadly. It could be that the idea of a limited presence on earth is an important notion sustaining the artist’s characteristically forceful drive toward the feeling, and often the colors, of mourning. The sadness is slightly hidden in these works of art, but the muted darknesses of Modersohn-Becker’s palette, along with a subject matter that addresses momentary recognitions of mortality, results in a body of work that, inevitably, takes on a deep-seated melancholy. Are we being too serious when we speak of the revelation of death as enforcing the emotion we come across? Perhaps not. Modersohn-Becker, very much of her time, looked closely at the nearness of mortality in her art.
Even the artist’s treatment of the landscape carries a mixture of contrasting tonalities. In the painting such as Marsh with Peat Barges, done around 1900, the channel of water cuts sharply across the composition with sumptuous ease; the upper reaches of the channel, high in the right corner are suffused by light, losing its glow only slightly as the water slowly but surely moves downward and cuts across a dark green expanse of peat. The barges, aligned in row on the left, are presented in the same deep green the peat is made of. The painting is very beautiful, very dramatic. Another small, seemingly inadvertent composition, called Landscape with Windblown Trees (no date), shows, in the foreground, two trees (the one on the left wit a double trunk) spread widely apart, toward either end of the painting. There is a meadow of green grass in the middle, behind which we see a man pulling a horse who is dragging some sort of heavy load. Above the scene is a linearly aligned group of trees, with wind-swept spheres of leaves. The scene, supposedly moderate in scope, is actually memorable for its portrayal of effort in the face of nature.
As I have indicated, a melancholic aura can be found in Modersohn-Becker’s treatment of the landscape. The 1900 painting titled Worpsweder Landscape with Red House seems grim in its atmosphere. The image presentation consists of a gray tree rising in the right foreground, while the middle register is taken up with an expanse of grass. In the back there is the red house mentioned in the title. It is flanked on the left by a round expanse of foliage, and on the right by a hill, seemingly of dirt. The tree is not alone, being seconded by other trees, all of them slightly stunted with small amounts of leaves. It is a marvelous picture, driven into a slightly dark milieu by the nearly grim coloring and simplified forms.
The beautiful, more or less mystical 1906 painting called Standing and Kneeling Nude Girls in Front of Poppies, II, shows two young female children facing other with expressions of utmost gravity. Both are without clothing; their short haircut gives them innocence. The little girl on the left is painted a light tan. She is kneeling. The girl directly in front of her on the right stands; her skin is whiter in color. Both hold oval fruit in their hands Above, red poppies invest the aura of the composition with a mystical, otherworldly atmosphere that feels both visionary and threatening–this despite the innocent beauty of the children.
It is interesting to noten that the year 1907, the last year of Modersohn-Becker’s life, was the same year that ushered in cubism with Picasso’s great cubist painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Modersohn-Becker gave no sign of he structural changes soon to take place in art; her esthetic was committed to a realism that had little to do with the abstraction that would begin very quickly after her passing. The artist’s realism, though, clearly was of a new sort, in which psychological issues, addressed as variations in color and shifts in theme, took on mythic gravity. So the newness had to do with feeling rather than formal structure. In this sense Modersohn-Becker was very much a painter active before cubism, albeit one who took on subject matter unusual in light of interests by earlier painters. Instead of a cubist scaffolding, in which the painting’s structure is dominated by an objective intellect, Modersohn-Smith turned to a depth of emotion rare in fine art. Everything is silently achieved, so that emotion is implied and intuited, strengthening the feeling at hand. It might be said that Modersohn-Becker represented the end of an era, but that does not mean in any way that she was looking . Instead, she embraced, as she would have done necessarily as a German artist shaped by affluence and high culture, a connectedness with people and the rich emotional lives her family, friends, and acquaintances seem to have pursued. So, instead of experimentation, depth plays a large part in the works.
Modersohn-Becker has a particularly beautiful painting, titled Young Girl with Yellow Flowers in a Glass (1902), which exquisitely demonstrates the sensitivity of a young girl, at the very point of adolescent beginnings. Her brown hair is put up in a bun, and she wears a light brown dress with short sleeves, along with a black-and-white necklace held together by a small amulet. Her countenance is one of high focus, on the blue-and-white glass that holds a bouquet of yellowflowers. Beyond her is blue-gray interior wall; two paintings are placed on the wall, although these are too vague in their imagery to be adequately described. It is the face of this marvelous young person, given to the kind of beauty that affluence supports, which holds us. There need be no mention of class or social mores; Modersohn-Becker has painted a masterful study of nature in the hands of someone devoted both to art and flora.
As for the artist’s reputation in an art historical sense, it seem secure in Modersohn-Becker’s gravity and symbolic expressionism, which has imbued her art with a seriousness very different from, say, the French. This turn-of-the-century art; along with a sharp knowledge of knowing art history, we makes it clear that the German artist was painting in a way that leaves us wondering why shifts in styles take place. Even though Modersohn-Becker made no direct overtures to the new century, despite the fact that she lived a few years into the new era, he work transformed the traditional into something marvelously direct and independent. The artist’s fixity of purpose, coupled with a gravity we must admire, resulted in a body of work that turned her art into something magical, mysterious, and even miraculously of interest. Jonathan Goodman
There is no sense of challenge or revolt in the painting—only the cherished moment in which a small bunch of flowers is permanently focused on and approved of by a girl who herself becomes and object of study. As a moment of praise, the painting is profoundly an example of a beauty hard for us to see today. One can only marvel at Modersohn-Becker’s ability to focus vision into a spectacular moment, in which the human becomes richer for reasons of spiritual drive and reasons of natural presence.
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