Women who light the lamps
I began this essay thinking I would begin by referencing the first elegy of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, in which he writes of Gaspara Stampa, a sixteenth-century Italian poet—a woman who is considered to have been the greatest woman poet of the Italian Renaissance and is regarded by many as the greatest Italian woman poet of any age. Rilke wrote:
Have you imagined / Gaspara Stampa intensely enough so that any girl / deserted by her beloved might be inspired / by that fierce example of soaring, objectless love / and might say to herself, "Perhaps I can be like her?" - Rilke
Rilke has always been on the shelf of lighthouse poets in my mind—those that I return to, that seem to hold wisdom beyond time, beyond themselves. But as I searched for details of Stampa’s life and poetry, I found myself drawn to read Rilke again—struck by his desire for a wisdom beyond gender, where men and women could be united in common humanity, rather than pitted as opposites. In Letters to a Young Poet he writes:
…And perhaps the sexes are more related than we think, and the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and as human beings, in order simply, seriously and patiently to bear in common the difficult sex that has been laid upon them.
So as I turned back to Rilke, I set aside Stampa for another time and picked up the thread of the painter and diarist Paula Modherson-Becker, a friend of Rilke and his wife’s, the sculptor Clara Westhoff.
Rilke was entranced with both Paula and Clara when he met them at an artists’ colony in Germany and grew close to both women.
Paula was a student at the colony, finding inspiration in the women and girls of the rural landscape—solitary farm girls, mothers nursing children, older women at housework. Interested in the human figure, Paula painted women as women—not for the male gaze or as virgins or prostitutes, but as women nursing, working, the female form as it truly is. Her figures of women and girls are sturdy, frequently posed in awkward positions, making no overtures to the gaze of the viewer. It’s about the figures, the women themselves. She was also the first woman artist to paint nude self-portraits.
When she could she would hire Italian models in Paris, a place she would visit often and felt energized by. At that time in Paris, Italian models accepted being painted nude because, as recent immigrants, they were very poor. Marie Darrieussecq, who wrote an imaginative biography of Paula in 2016, writes that Paula sometimes felt ashamed painting women naked, but she needed to do it to achieve her vision. As a student, she had learned to paint nudes by looking at corpses, as female students weren’t allowed to paint from live models in Germany. Only men were allowed to. Paris was the only city at the time where female students were allowed to paint naked models and learn anatomy.
What does that do to one’s vision of self and of women, when all you know of painting women comes from observing the dead, and not the living? What does it do to one’s psyche to observe the details of a woman’s lifeless body, to interpret and recreate the female form in the stillness of death?
Paula married the painter, Otto Modersohn and became the stepmother to his two-year-old daughter from his first marriage. Clara married Rilke, and was pregnant by the time of their wedding.
Paula had ambivalent feelings about marriage and motherhood, and the effects it would have on her art. By 1906 she found marriage and wifedom interfering with her work, and she left to paint in Paris for a year. She was worried about motherhood—the ramifications of it delaying her art, her career. Her husband and family begged her to return home, but she was having the most productive year of her life. She wrote her sister: “I am becoming somebody – I’m living the most intensively happy period of my life.”
In a letter to Rilke Paula wrote "And now, I don't even know how I should sign my name, I'm not Modersohn and I'm not Paula Becker anymore either." Less than a month later she writes from Paris to her husband, "try to get used to the possibility of the thought that our lives can go separate ways." She began to sign her name only “Paula.”
On her sixth anniversary, alone in Paris still, Paula painted herself pregnant—even though she was not. As if she was trying it on for size, trying to visually foretell or understand how it would feel. Her gaze direct, unwavering.
Clara and Paula would write to each other while Paula was in Paris, while Clara was a new mother with a young baby. Clara loved her child, but she was hungry to do something else. She wrote Paula that she wanted to do simple things like ride her bicycle (something that was a new found freedom for women, particularly), but never could because Rilke was completely absent—he couldn’t stand the sound of the baby crying and believed it interfered with his writing, so he left.
Paula had felt as though Clara had given up art for marriage, motherhood. Clara had been a student of Rodin’s, and had written a monograph on his work. But I suspect Paula’s feelings towards Clara were because of her own fear, of the frenetic ambivalence of not wanting and wanting at the same time, knowing what was expected of her would prevent that which was most important to her—her art.
Adrienne Rich would later write a poem imagining the conversation that Paula and Clara would have had about art, life, motherhood, marriage.
Paula finally returned to Germany in 1907 and soon found herself pregnant. On November 2, 1907, her daughter Mathile (Tillie) Modersohn was born. She and Otto were joyous. But nineteen days later she died of an embolism in her leg. After the pregnancy, she complained of severe leg pain, and the doctor ordered bed rest. After 18 days she was told she needed to get up and begin moving, but as she stood up, the blood clot dislodged, causing her death within hours. She walked a few steps, complained of leg pain, sat back down, asked for her child to be placed in her arms, and soon died, saying only “Schade"—a pity. The last picture of Paula is of her in bed, with her new baby, days before she died.
Rilke wrote to a friend of the profound shock of her death: “It stood in front of me, so huge and close that I could not shut my eyes.” Beginning in the fall of that year, Rilke published Requiem for a Friend for Paula in 1908.
It is thought that her work would have fallen into obscurity, but for her writing—the diaries and many letters she wrote to her fellow artists. These were collected and published widely in the 1920s, yet remained untranslated until the 1970s.
In 1927, Ludwig Roselius, a German coffee trader, supported Paula’s legacy by opening the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, designed by the sculptor, decorative artist, and architect Bernhard Hoetger. A unique building that is considered one of the most important examples of Expressionist architecture in Germany, it was the first museum in the world dedicated to the work of a female painter. The street and museum were denounced by Hitler, but finally allowed the street and buildings to remain as a monument to ‘degenerate art.' In 2018, Paula was celebrated in a Google doodle.
Many know the works and style of Gaugin, Cezanne, Picasso, and yet even with a museum dedicated to her work, Paula is often neglected and forgotten in surveys of modern expressionist art.
The unwavering gaze of many of the women and girls in Paula’s portraits seem to stand with resolution, defiant in the silence that for so long has obscured the reality of women as women—as workers, mothers, girls, as wise, awkward and strong. As artists.
Gaspara Stampa, whom Rilke also wrote of, also died early at the age of 31. She was published only posthumously, by her sister Cassandra in 1554. Rilke writes of Stampa in the first of his Duino Elegies, often considered his strongest work.
Two women—writers, poets, painters, visionaries—found together in the works of Rilke, in two of his most celebrated works. But Paula Modersohn-Becker and Gaspara Stampa were not only muses or subjects of poetry long after their death—they were poems themselves.