Paula Modersohn-Becker
Radical, Modernist, Mother?
Paula Modersohn-Becker Portrait at the 6th Wedding Day, 1906.
PMB Museum, Bremen. 101.8 cm × 70.2 cm (40.1 in × 27.6 in), tempura on canvas.
Paula Modersohn-Becker is one of my favourite artists, and one I was startled to discover only a couple of years ago. Yes I know - shocks all round that a groundbreaking, astonishingly talented female artist had yet again mysteriously not been included in the canon, at least in the UK. Happily this is changing, and fast. She was one of the standout figures for me in the Royal Academy London’s fantastic exhibition last year, ‘Making Modernism’. I was thrilled to be invited to give a talk for the Study Weekend put on by the RA to coincide with the exhibition, and although this particular painting wasn’t at the RA then, it’s one I’d like to talk about now. (There’s a great video tour of the exhibition with talks from the curators here: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/making-modernism)
Portrait at the 6th Wedding Day was discussed by the curator Dorothy Rowe and the artist Chantal Joffe in an audience conversation at one of the exhibition events, and also in the catalogue. Joffe said something interesting, in that she recognised in Modersohn-Becker the drive to turn to self-prortaiture as a way of working through a moment of crisis or a question about self and identity. Joffe said:
‘When I first saw it at a young age, I literally felt it spoke to me across time, painter to painter … I felt such a flash of recognition … her self-portraiture … marks moments of great questioning and artistic change, but also personal change too. I identify with that … because for me, self-portraiture always does that. It’s always at moments of upheaval or distress that I’ll turn to self-portraiture…’.1
I found these comments so revealing, partly because this self-portrait isn’t quite what it seems. We see a young woman cradling a swollen belly, protectively resting her arms above and below her bump in a universal signal of maternity, with a hand curled in a way that suggests to me the artist was thinking of giving her a fruit to hold (there are many other PMB nudes and other figures holding oranges or lemons in a similar way). Is this an Eve then? Jennifer Higgie in her fantastic book The Mirror and the Palette, all about women artist’s self-portraiture, explains that Modersohn-Becker wasn’t, as she appears in this picture, pregnant at the time she painted it. We know she didn’t have a child until November 1907.2
She looks pregnant here, and is clearly emphasising that with her arms cradling her belly, and her expression is thoughtful, questioning. She is asking herself the time-honoured question of female artists (and indeed many working women everywhere), of whether she can or should become a mother. It’s also, to me, an instantly familiar activity of young women everywhere, sticking out their bellies and looking in the mirror: what would I look like pregnant? Or even, who would I be, if pregnant?
Who should Modersohn-Becker be, a mother or an artist? How is it possible to be both? Who will she be if she becomes pregnant, has a child? Perhaps she is also asking what her marriage is about, given the title of the painting.
And at the same time she is resolutely modern and modernist in her artistic approach. As far as I know, she is the first female artist to paint herself in the nude, and she does so in a way that immediately calls into question the idea of who ‘The Nude’ can be. She does this by combining the two genres - Nude (nameless, beautiful muse) and Self-Portrait (named, important artist). While asking a question about what a woman can be - whether we can ever ‘have it all’ - she also breaks the barrier of separation between the artist as image maker and the nude as object used to create the picture, making this painting a truly modernist image.
We are under no illusions with Modersohn-Becker that this nude is a classical nymph or fantasy figure, she is a deliberating, thinking, considering person caught in a situation in which no clear solution is apparent. This nude is beautiful, but real - a person who inhabits both body and mind. At the time Modersohn-Becker painted this she was living apart from the husband she had left behind in Germany, and living and painting freely in her own studio in Paris. Think who else was painting at the crest of the modernist wave in Paris at the exact same time - Matisse was experimenting with colour, Picasso with cubism. Cezanne, who Modersohn-Becker idolised, would die in October of that year still working furiously in the South of France. Paula saw every Cezanne painting she could manage in Paris, as well as spending days sketching in the Louvre and taking lessons at Academy Colarossi - one of the few places in Europe at the time where female students could draw from nude models.
Modersohn-Becker is addressing us as a resolutely modern artist, and at the same time showing us what an impossible position it was for a female artist who wanted to succeed and be fearless - in art and in life - to have a family.
The tragedy of this image is that little over a year later, and having sold almost nothing during her lifetime, at the age of just 31, Paula would be dead. Having made her decision to reconcile with her husband (the painter Otto Modersohn) and go back to the German artists’ colony of Worpswede, and having given birth to a daughter, Mathilde, Paula was advised to remain in bed for a period of time. This was the custom at the time, but something that is now known to cause fatal complications. Twenty days after giving birth Paula got up from her bed, held her daughter, and collapsed and died. Imagine what she could have painted if she had lived more than 31 years.
You can see more of her work at the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen, Germany, website here: https://www.museen-boettcherstrasse.de/museen/
Chantal Joffe and Dorothy Price in conversation, January 2022, recorded in the exhibition catalogue Making Modernism, (London: Royal Academy Publication, 2022), 29-30.
Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2021).