Читать книгу Art of the 20th Century - Dorothea Eimert - Страница 5

Fritz Mackensen, Otto Modersohn and Hans am Ende moved in 1889 to the small, undisturbed village of Worpswede bordering the Teufelsmoor north of Bremen. Modelling themselves after the French artists, Camille Corot, Théodor Rousseau and Charles-François Daubigny at the Barbizon school, they created a working and living community. As Otto Modersohn confided in his diary and in similar fashion to his fellow painters in southern Germany, at Dachau, the goal of the Worpswede artists was to put a deep poetic feeling for nature into the painting. Eventually, more young painters, tired of the big cities, joined the artists’ community, such as Fritz Overbeck in 1893, Heinrich Vogeler in 1894 and finally Clara Westhoff and her future husband, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. An artist colony arose that in the course of time attracted different artists and that to this day welcomes artists of various genres.

These painters, who had fled the traditionalism of the art academies, sought to paint the deep, intimate experience of nature. They sought to paint impressions of nature like the clear light and sunsets over the moor, or the fleeting clouds over the Teufelsmoor. The basic tendency in their painting style was towards the lyrical and restrained. They did not want to be critical. Rather, they sought in open nature to find transcendence, the ideal life. The painter, Paula Becker from Dresden, who had studied art in Bremen, London and Berlin, joined in 1898. At Worpswede she found many kindred spirits and her great love. In September 1900, she secretly got engaged to Otto Modersohn, who had lost his first wife shortly before. In the following year, the already famous painter, Otto Modersohn, married the young, unknown Paula Becker. Her first portraits and studies of the moor and birch forest landscape were influenced by Impressionism. They, however, already showed the signs of a reduced painting structure and the departure from the illusion of space.

The nature-inspired sensual expression of her colleagues at Worpswede did not satisfy Paula Modersohn-Becker. She recognised that the important ideas were only to be found in the artistic centre of Paris. She soon fled the limited possibilities of Worpswede. In 1900 she travelled to Paris where she was first exposed to the artistic avant-garde. She was intoxicated by the atmosphere and sensory impressions of Paris. The paintings of Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin impressed her immensely. At the Drouot auction house, she, together with Clara and Rainer Maria Rilke, was deeply influenced by the paintings and crafts from China and Japan. She wrote in her diary:

The great strangeness of these things got to me. Our art it seems to me is still too conventional. It poorly expresses those impulses that run through us. It seems to me that the ancient Japanese art is more at ease.

Modersohn-Becker was greatly inspired while viewing the art of antiquity during a visit to the Louvre in 1903. ‘How large and easy they are to see,’ she wrote regarding the Egyptian mummy portraits… ‘forehead, mouth, eyes, nose, cheeks and chin – that is all. It sounds so simple and yet it is indeed so very, very much.’

Under the inspiration of the Egyptian mummy portraits, she began a series of self-portraits. Like the mummies, she represents herself with peculiarly large eyes and an enraptured, almost suggestive glance. Her studio is now decorated with a frieze of reproductions from these mummies, who look at the viewer and at the same time look with rapture into the distance.

Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait with a Camellia Branch, 1907.

Oil on canvas, 61.5 × 30.5 cm. Folkwang Museum, Essen.

When she returned from Paris, the local farms and children of the village became her preferred models and she sought to simplify the portrait form. Colour, for her, was more important than the depiction. In her paintings, she attempted to embody the essential character of these people, who were marked by work, poverty and the rugged landscape. She modelled her farmers and children in the same paste-like paints, avoiding any smoothness in her colour, showing them with angular features, monumental, with austere expressions, but full of sensuality. In her paintings she reflected the view people had of themselves, their strength, their inner greatness and their dignity. In her paintings she was able to express great sensitivity and emotional depth. One example is the painting Elderly Woman in the Poor House Garden. Paula Modersohn-Becker painted the old woman as if in an icon, down to earth, grainy, broad shouldered, her heavy hands placed in her lap. Placing her between wild poppies, she crowns and honours her with the glow of a reserved, clay-like colour scheme.

In her paintings the motif of mother and child achieves a quality of love, tenderness, and intimacy. The sense of emotion appears unsentimental, austere, and sincere. She masterfully understood how to transfer the essential physical and emotional part of a person into the painting, freeing it from all the surrounding ornamentation. She sought simplicity of form. In her diary, she wrote, ‘I would like to give the intoxicating, the complete, the exciting to colour – the power.’ Unfortunately, Paula Modersohn-Becker’s promising career was cut short when at the age of thirty-two, and only few days after the birth of her daughter, Mathilde, she died of an embolism. Despite the very short period of creative activity that was given her, she left behind a wide range of works: around 750 paintings and over 1000 sketches, diaries and letters. During her lifetime she just sold five paintings.

Rainer Maria Rilke described her unorthodox painting style as ‘reckless and straight on.’ At the beginning of November 1908 in Paris, he wrote a requiem for Paula in which it reads:

In December 1908, a retrospective for Paula Modersohn-Becker was shown in Bremen. In early 1909 Paul Cassirer showed Paula’s paintings next to those of van Gogh, Manet, Monet and Renoir in Berlin. In 1927 Ludwig Roselius, founder of the coffee trading company Kaffee-Handels-Aktien-Gesellschaft (HAG), established a museum in her honour on the Böttcherstrasse in Bremen, saying: ‘Paula was a painter of the truth. Before her there was never a painter, who had painted the truth. The great painters of our time: Munch, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cézanne and the others have striven for this truth.’

During the National Socialist era, her paintings were removed from the museums and shown at the 1937 exhibit of degenerate art. Today Paula Modersohn-Becker is considered to be a major pioneer of Expressionism.

Paula Modersohn-Becker, Old PoorhouseWoman with a Glass Bottle, 1907.

Oil on canvas, 96.3 × 80.2 cm. Böttcherstraße drawings collection, Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen.

Otto Dix, Self-Portrait in Mars, 1915.

Oil on canvas, 81 × 66 cm. Haus der Heimat, Freital.