Beyond the male gaze
A modernist who defied convention had a firm sense of her own unique path.
Born in Germany in 1876, the third of seven children, Paula Becker devoted her short life to painting. She was so committed to her art that she left more than 700 paintings, and although only three sold in her lifetime, she is now widely recognised as an important early modernist.
She created the first nude self-portrait by a female artist (it adorns the book’s cover), and as Marie Darrieussecq puts it, her work reveals “real women … stripped of the masculine gaze”.
Darrieussecq is a prize-winning French novelist, whose works all have female protagonists. Rather than a conventional biography, this book is a vividly empathetic impressionist collage, not of “Paula M Becker’s life as she lived it, but my own sense of it a century later. A trace.”
It succeeds particularly well in illuminating the painter’s firm sense of her own unique path: “She knows what she is looking for,” Darrieussecq writes. “Perhaps she is conscious of something she has to say, something specific to her, still almost unheard of, still almost not seen: a woman painting women.”
Becker married landscape painter Otto Modersohn in 1901 and was, for a while, stepmother to his daughter, but the book captures the extent to which, as Modersohn-Becker, she defied convention and lived like a male artist. She spent months at a time away from her husband to work in Paris, seeing paintings by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and probably Picasso.
Eventually, she told Otto their marriage was over, but in 1906, they reconciled. That year, on her sixth wedding anniversary, she painted that now-celebrated nude self-portrait. Although it seems to show her pregnant, her first child was conceived in 1907.
She died at 31, 18 days after giving birth to her daughter. Her last words were “Wie schade” (“What a pity”).
It was only thanks to her mother publishing a hugely successful selection of her journal entries and letters that interest in Modersohn-Becker began to grow. This lively, attractive book is an excellent introduction to her world and her astonishing achievement.