Paula Modersohn-Becker, a groundbreaking feminist artist, died in 1907 at the age of only thirty-one. She was the first female artist to paint herself not only naked but pregnant. Award-winning author Marie Darrieussecq wrote Being Here: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker, an insightful and lyrical biography of a remarkable woman who broke artistic boundaries and paved the way for many female artists to come.
‘Marie Darrieussecq reads the testament of Modersohn-Becker—the letters, the diaries, and above all the paintings—with a burning intelligence and a fierce hold on what it meant and means to be a woman and an artist.’ J. M. Coetzee
We asked Marie some questions about Paula Modersohn-Becker and her place in the world of art.
Being Here is written in an almost surrealist stream-of-consciousness style. Why did you write this biography in this style?
A life is not a book. Life is much more than words.
What do you love best about Paula Becker?
Her obstinacy. Her egoism. She needed them.
Paula’s demands for her own independence are strong. Was it a strange thing for a woman to pursue her own liberty and vision during the early 1900s in Europe?
It was very unusual. At the beginning of the 20th century there were only two places on the planet where women were even allowed to take life-drawing classes—two private and very expenses academies in Paris, where Paula went and learned a lot.
Paula’s husband, Otto Modersohn, and her confidant, Rainer Maria Rilke, both recognised that her artistic gaze was radically new. Do you think they understood it as feminist?
They recognised it as new but rejected it as not pretty (Otto) or not very interesting (Rilke). In his Requiem (one year after Paula’s death), Rilke says she paints like nobody else, but he doesn’t name her. He just says: ‘a friend’.
Do you have an idea of where Paula’s art might have headed, had she not died so young?
Cubism. She knows it instinctively. Her last works are heading in that direction. She dies the same year (1907) that Picasso, her exact contemporary, holds a Congolese mask in his hand and understands he can paint a face like a mask, or a mask like a face, three dimensions seen at the same time.
Why do you think Paula is all but unknown in English-speaking countries?
Woman + German = it takes a loooong time.
Your introduction to Paula was through a small flier featuring a painting by her of a mother breastfeeding. Have you seen the original?
I’ve seen almost all the originals now. I’ve seen that one at least twenty times…I fell in love. Nobody has ever painted a mother-and-child painting like that: breastfeeding in that casual, obvious position, not sitting erect like in all the Madonna portraits, and most of all a mother-and-child painting that is neither sacred nor erotic. Just a woman painted by another woman.
How important do you think Paula is to contemporary feminism?
She’s the first woman to have painted herself naked—naked and pregnant. Suzanne Valadon paints herself naked in 1916, eleven years later. When Paula visited the Louvre in 1900, the museum was full of naked women, painted by men, and only four women were displayed as painters.
Being Here is available now at all good bookshops and in ebook.
