Excerpts

Chapter One Let us begin with two sisters dressed for a ball. It is 1904, the beginning of the century that is closing as I write, and the sisters are somewhere in Australia, in a house that isn't quite the measure of their dresses. Beyond this there is little I can tell you, for these adorned `Two Girls in White' are not in a novel where all could be revealed, but captured for ever in that uncertain moment on the canvas of their artist brother. There they sit, with their forlorn faces, decked in muslin and silk, satin and lace, cream and white. There's a coat thrown over the back of the chair behind one of the sisters and it seems to rise around her like the wings of an angel. The other sister leans into her arm, weary, as if she needs to prop herself up. They are waiting--but for what? For the ball to begin? For the coach to arrive? For the beau? Or are they resigned to their fate which is simply to wait?     Whenever I look at this painting--which, as it is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is quite often--I think they are waiting for the century to begin. Which of course it had; it was 1904 already. And yet, knowing as we do what the century would bring, it is as if they are waiting for something to happen that would release them from the clothes that so utterly mismatch their expressions. You can see from their faces that they are not the girls who went to balls in nineteenth-century novels; and you can see from their clothes that there is nothing of the modern woman about them.     In biographical fact the two sisters were dressed for no better reason than to pose for their brother, Hugh Ramsay, who had recently returned home to them from Paris ill with tuberculosis. He had gone to seek his fortune in the city that promised most for those who wanted to paint the shape of the new century; but it was also a city that extracted its price in poverty and cold studios from those who could not afford its comforts. It might seem a romantic gesture, going to Paris to become an artist, but the stakes were high, and Hugh Ramsay was dead before he was thirty. If the sisters are sad as they watch him paint them, it is because they could see that he was dying. The mismatch of the painting--which one of Melbourne's stuffier critics found `wanting in beauty or repose"--was that Hugh Ramsay had dressed his mourning sisters for a ball they no longer wanted to go to.     He painted them dressed as good women had been customarily dressed for their portraits in the century that had just gone, and yet, perhaps because of his experience in Paris, that had allowed him a glimpse of the possibilities to come, he could see their discomfort and irritation, and he could see the disjuncture, even if he did not comprehend it. The achievement and power of the painting is that we see the sisters not only as he saw them, but as they saw him seeing them suspended between a past that was over, dying with their brother, and a future to which they could not yet give shape.     If one is to be literal about it, these sisters, these `Two Girls in White', are waiting for their brother to die. But the success of the painting--with its weird disjunctures that discomfited the Age but engage us--is that the sisters are also waiting for possibilities that hadn't yet arrived. Take them out of those dresses and put them into artists' smocks, and those faces belong absolutely to the century in which they were painted. Hugh Ramsay died of T.B., an individual fate acted out in an individual family in one of those solid, lugubrious houses that still squat on the ridges of our cities, and neither of his sisters became artists. But there were girls from those sorts of families, plenty of them, struggling out of their filmy dresses and into the work-clothes of an artist, looking for a way of being that would match the reach and intelligence of their faces. And their stories, as they would unfold, were to be tied to the fates of their brothers and the young men of their generation, and it was no less sorrowful if they knew them only as statistics posted back from the trenches of a war that would change everything.     The First World War was still a decade away when Hugh Ramsay painted his sisters, and it is a token of his ability that he could capture in their faces something of a century that hadn't yet shown its shape. Which is why this painting is--for me--a beginning; a first glimpse of the ambiguities of expectation and sorrow, promise and apprehension, that are to be found in the lives, and on the canvases, of the women who did exchange those ballgowns for clothes that could take the smear of paint; the women who greeted the first decades of the twentieth century by lifting those dresses over their heads to see what they looked like underneath, unadorned, no longer in disguise. * * * In the year of Hugh Ramsay's death, 1906, a young German woman, almost exactly his age--born in 1876 to his 1877--was living alone in Paris. Her name was Paula Modersohn-Becker and, although we know her as one of the first--and best--of Europe's women modernists, at the time she was barely known outside her own circle in a small artists' colony near Bremen in Germany. There is no way that she could have been more widely known, as the only paintings of hers that had been exhibited were student works in a group exhibition in Bremen in 1899. The critical response had been so bad that her parents had begged their daughter--who was then not married--to give up her hopes of art and become a governess. At least when Hugh Ramsay got his bad reviews there was a grudging admission that he could paint, however inadequate the particular painting was considered to be. In Paula Modersohn-Becker's case, the outrage stemmed from the very fact that she--and two other young women--were on the wall at all, displacing the paintings her furious critic was `accustomed to seeing there'. `The vocabulary of pure speech is not adequate to discuss the work of [these] ladies,' he wrote for the good burghers of Bremen--including Paula's parents--to read. `A wretched lack of talent,' he bellowed as he frightened himself with the prospect of the work of young women spreading itself `on wall after wall'. A prospect made all the worse by these young women's embracing of modern art. It was one thing to have a woman paint a competent portrait, as girls of the late nineteenth century were taught to do; quite another to have them veering off in pursuit of their own feelings. `Lawless subjectivity,' he assured his readers, `has never yet entered the mind of a great artist.' And this was the key to it. The claim made by a woman like Paula Modersohn-Becker did two alarming things. It confronted critics and viewers with a subjectivity that was not only lawless but feminine, and it unsettled their comfortable notions of what art was.     Look at her in this 1906 self-portrait. There she is, bare-breasted against a speckled but otherwise featureless background, wearing an amber necklace and cradling her pregnant belly; her arms are protective, at once bold and diffident as she shows us this vulnerable swelling. You can see at a glance that this young woman has left the safe conventions of late-nineteenth-century portraiture. While The Sisters (as the `Two Girls in White' are now called) owes a debt to Sargent, here there's a whiff of Gauguin, a passing bow to Cézanne. The painting is stripped back to essentials; and so is she, Paula Modersohn-Becker, the artist. Stripped back to flesh and belly. And rather than avert her eyes so that we can watch her without being seen to look, she meets our eye in a manner that is quizzical but challenging as she stakes her powerful claim to the twentieth century. The woman, for so long the subject of art, the object men paint, turns--pregnant and in command of her own image--and looks back, facing us. Is that the challenge of this self-portrait? Or is she saying that the modern age may have dawned but women still have the realities of their bodies to contend with? Pregnant is still not an adjective that goes easily with artist .     Just to confuse the issue, let me tell you that in 1906, when she painted this self-portrait, Paula Modersohn-Becker was not pregnant. She had left her husband in Germany at the beginning of that year and had taken herself to live in Paris in search of the life of art she had not managed to find at the artists' colony at Worpswede. When she had married its director, Otto Modersohn, she had, wittingly or not, made the move of aligning herself with a man who was an artist in the hope that the marriage would foster her own artistic ambitions. It is a common move, many women have made it, and it beats being a governess; for the creative woman, drawn to an artistic milieu in pursuit of the freedom she needs both in love and in art, there is often something attractive in the sensibility and knowledge of the men she finds there. So a marriage like Paula Modersohn-Becker's was less a calculated gesture than the merger of desires. She had every reason to believe that her love for this man, and his confidence in her work, would provide the protection and spur she needed. But the reality failed to match her hopes, and after escaping for a few brief interludes in Paris where she felt the stir of possibility that she could not feel at Worpswede, she left Otto. She left the child whom she had inherited from his first marriage in the care of her own mother, and caught the train to Paris. There, where the great shift in sensibility had begun that would usher in new ways of being and new ways of seeing, it was the provincial critic, and not Paula Modersohn-Becker, who was out of step.     I tell the story in the briefest detail and wish to emphasise that Otto Modersohn was not an unloving husband. He adored her, he admired her work, and had the generosity to see that she, not he, was the one with the ability and the quality of vision that could leave a mark past their own time. But they both lived under a social regimen that took for granted the necessary role of a wife and stepmother--and the right of a husband to be supported in his chosen profession. However much he might admire her, and wish success upon her, by this scale his art was a career, hers a supplementary talent.     It wasn't that Paula Modersohn-Becker was unhappy in any straightforward way. Many of her letters from Worpswede show that her daily life with Otto and the child was harmonious for months at a time. Rather, she found that while he was infused with energy by their marriage, she was drained. It was as if she sank under the weight of her role as wife of the director, disappointed that the man who had vowed to her in love could not understand what she needed, what she felt, what she was . His view of her, for all its generosity, was obliterated by his need for her; or perhaps it was that his need for her became his view of her. `Otto seems to need my face to look at several times a day,' she wrote to her sister in her second year of marriage. Seeing her there beside him, Otto was restored to his studio where he painted landscapes with the poetic and rather sentimental sensibility of Worpswede; and Paula Modersohn-Becker was left with the loneliness that assaults women in the company of men who cannot comprehend the burden of their love. By the end of 1905, after four years of marriage, the tug and pull of this conflict had produced an unbearable tension in her. Mother, wife, muse: there was not enough soul left for her as artist. `I was not able to endure it any longer,' she wrote to her mother from Paris. `And I shall probably never be able to endure it again.'     In one brief year in Paris, living alone, Paula Modersohn-Becker painted most of the paintings by which we know this extraordinarily talented woman. `I'm living the most intensely happy period of my life,' she confided to her sister. `Pray for me.' And she added this tell--tale request: `Send me sixty francs for models' fees. Thank you.'     She painted women and children, as she always had done, but the images became stronger, bolder, clarified , flooded with `the unconscious feeling that often murmurs so softly and sweetly inside me'. It was as if she painted the essence of that powerful world of play and bond that is created in the safe space between mother and child, a space that is often seen as the prototype, and origin, of creativity itself. She painted still lives, grave with the wonder of objects--fruit, jugs, trays--as if they, like her, were new to a world that was seeing itself anew. And she painted her celebrated self-portraits, peeling away all the roles and expectations that had burdened her; as the letters poured in from her mother and her husband, begging her to return, she painted not so much to decipher the conflict that pursued her, as to know the dilemma and to know what she was, if she could strip back beyond it, or before it, to that raw space of possibility that the mother holds open for the child.     The most famous of the self-portraits from that year of energy and freedom is this one in which she shows herself bare-breasted and pregnant. Which she wasn't. By 1907 she would be; but not in 1906. It seems to me, looking at this self-portrait from the other end of the century, that it is less a premonition than an image of the unknowing with which she--as artist and as woman--was living. Does she hold her belly swollen not so much with a child as with her own imaginings and ambitions? Is her belly swollen with the complexity of her desires? Is the self-portrait a coded acknowledgment that a child was what she did, in fact, want? Or what she feared? Or is it a question rather of what manner of child the woman as artist would bring forth into the world of modernity?     In June of 1906 Otto Modersohn came to Paris to claim his errant wife. She resisted, and he returned to Worpswede. At the end of the year he came again, and this time stayed until she agreed to return to Germany in the spring of 1907. For a year Paula had been in the humiliating position of having to ask for support in the same breath as she begged for her freedom. Her paintings, of immense value at the end of the century, were, in monetary terms, without value in 1906. She only sold one during her life and that was bought as an act of patronage by her friend, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Art, as Virginia Woolf has said, is tethered at every corner by crude facts like money and the houses we live in, and there's no escaping this blunt reality.     By the end of 1906 even Paula Modersohn-Becker's strongest supporters were beginning to worry that she wouldn't survive, and that, embattled and imperilled, she would lose the momentum of her work; already they could see the effect of anxiety as she brooded over the impossibility of her situation. After a year alone she was lonely and knew that the cost of independence was not only to be measured by the franc; there are other forms of support that it is hard to live without. She was thirty in 1906; of course pregnancy was on her mind. It was at the heart of the predicament of this young woman pulled inward to the clash between the longings of her belly and her own imaginative force, advised by everyone who cared for her that her best interests as well as her very survival lay in a return to Germany and her husband.     How was she to continue living and working alone, given over to her painting, when, in March 1907, she realised she was indeed pregnant? She stayed in Paris for one last exhibition of Cézanne--`glorious things from his youth'--before she wrote to her mother to tell her that she would soon be a grandmother. Then she returned to Worpswede. She continued to paint during her pregnancy--still lives, some powerful studies of mothers and babies--but the great self-portraits, with their `lawless subjectivity', belonged to that year when both freedom and the dilemma were greatest.     The baby, a girl, was born on 2 November 1907, and on 20 November Paula was allowed up from her long confinement. She braided her hair, `wound the braids into a crown around her head', refused Otto's offer of his arm, walked ahead of him to join her family, asked for the child, and collapsed. When Otto ran to her aid. she had time only to say, `A Pity,' before she died of an embolism. * * * The story of Paula Modersohn-Becker, though awful, is not particularly unusual. I tell it less to shock than to illustrate a dilemma: every element of it, except the form of her death, will be replayed in this book. In big ways and in small, being a woman and an artist in the first half of the twentieth century was a dangerous activity that required boldness, and also flexibility.     The Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison knew something of this when, as a very young woman, she found a jug at a jumble sale with the words Adventure to the Adventurous inscribed on it. She bought the jug as a talisman and took its words as her motto. There is something satisfying about the shape of a jug, and its capacity to contain, and to pour--which is, perhaps, why jugs turn up in many still lives by the early modernist women. Paula Modersohn-Becker painted a double-handled jug as round as a belly during her pregnancy in 1907. The Australian potter Gladys Reynell drew sheets of jugs to find the perfect design; her friend Margaret Preston painted one of her jugs--round and blue and shiny--in a 1924 still life of her pottery.     Taking up the jug and pouring from it, or drinking from it,. both in love and in art, was a task of great complexity for a young woman at the start of a complex, paradoxical century, and it is not much easier for those of us who lift the jug with the century's close. What has changed, though, is that our eyes have caught up with our modernist grandmothers; we can recognise them, where audiences of their time very often could not. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that our modernist grandmothers have taught us how to see the images they made of themselves, because they have also taught us to see ourselves. So that while we can respond with a kick of recognition to the impassioned subjectivity of Paula Modersohn-Becker's self-portrait, at the time that she painted it, in 1906, it was more likely to be regarded as lawless , barely decipherable at all. * * * There is a rider to the story of Paula Modersohn-Becker. Before her marriage, while still a girl in love with the idea of Art, she visited Worpswede several times with her friend, the sculptor Clara Westhoff. It was there that she and Clara met the poet Rilke who, it seems, fell in love with them both. He married Clara soon after, but retained a charged attachment to Paula, becoming crabby when she, in turn, married. He understood, as few men did, the clash between her life and her art, and--from the safe distance of not being her husband--was sympathetic. He tried (without success) to get her work exhibited again, and he took exception to the pregnancy that removed her from Paris. But although he admired her work, during her lifetime he held something in reserve, as if her painting wasn't quite what he thought art should be; in his letters, for all their friendly interest, there is an element of patronage. But he was the one who bought the only painting she sold, and after the critical humiliation of 1899, which was not forgotten, his support was a life-line.     When she died, Rilke was profoundly shocked. Her death, he wrote to a friend, `stood in front of me so huge and close that I could not shut my eyes'. Still grief-struck a year later, he went to the Cézanne retrospective that was held in Paris to commemorate the great painter, who had died in 1906. As he stood in front of Cézanne's paintings, he understood something about the nature of art as if for the first time, and that something allowed him to see, really to see, how good Paula had been. Out of the grief of an understanding that came too late, he wrote a long poem as homage to her and a naked rebuke to himself; fuelled with regret he railed against what he saw as life's savage disregard for art, and especially for a woman's art. `Ah let us lament.'     What Rilke responded to in Cézanne was an unwavering eye which reached into the essence of the thing itself, a kind of modesty that understood the profound gravity, and mysteriousness, of objects. If it seems obvious to us after a century in which Cézanne has become recognised as the grand master of post-impressionism, revealing the structure of things rather than their surface appearance, then remember the critic at Paula Modersohn-Becker's Bremen show, and Hugh Ramsay's critic in the Age . In 1906 the view Rilke came to was neither easy nor usual; for provincial critics and their audiences, indeed for all but the most sophisticated, art, to be worthy of the name, still meant something grander--an ordering of emotion into beauty and repose , the elevation of sensibility over lawless subjectivity--or, more modestly, the representation of objects, and people, and places as they appear to empirical observation. Through Cézanne, Rilke was suddenly able to understand Paula's capacity to see in the most simple of things-- fruit in white bowls --the essential presence of life, a fullness and thereness that needs no explanation, or justification, or myth, to hold it in place. He saw that in its drawing down into the humble--the sayable was his word for it--art can achieve the paradox of expressing the inexpressible mystery of ordinary things and modest moments. And he saw, too, that this was the way to the expression of the innermost experience of self. What I love about Rilke is that he had the humility--albeit dressed in awesome language--to translate this realisation into his understanding of the work of a woman who not only painted fruit in white bowls, but the condition of her own heart, which he had not been able to see--or bear?--while she was alive. For that is what you understood: ripe fruits. You set them before the canvas, in white bowls, and weighed out each one's heaviness with your colors. Women too, you saw, were fruits; and children, molded from inside, into the shapes of their existence. And at last, you saw yourself as a fruit, you stepped out of your clothes and brought your naked body before the mirror, you let yourself inside down to your gaze; which stayed in front, immense, and didn't say: I am that; no: this is.     This is : it sounds simple, but it isn't. No games or tricks, no demand or diversion. Instead the vision of the witness--knowing utterly, as if she is inside the image, making object subject, and yet sufficiently detached to see it, and herself, without illusion, in the depth and simplicity of being. Because of Paula Modersohn-Becker--because of his love for her--Rilke saw the feminine nature, and value, of that kind of art. Not as a lesser value but as art itself. At last, when Paula was dead, he saw her work--and her life--as a revelation. And he saw that the way forward for him as a poet was to follow where she led, and go deeper into her country. (Continues...) Copyright © 1999 Drusilla Modjeska. All rights reserved.