Never heard of her. Nope. Not a clue. But then – a recent show in New York (at the Neue Gallery until 9/9/24, so there’s still time, y’all, if’n you’re close – and inspired – enough), a dive into wiki, and a long rabbit hole run down a number of the paintings she produced in her short life and voila – what a incredible artist, gone much too soon. Born in Germany in 1876, Becker died in 1907 at only 31, which makes her output and impact even more impressive, even more so despite the Nazi’s destroying, repressing, or hiding many of her ‘degenerate’ works decades after her death.
How and why did Paula Becker die so young? After giving birth, and being told by her doctor to stay in bed in order to ‘rest and recover’ – women being so delicate and all. Think about this, for literal eons women had to give birth while continuing to move and forage and work in fields or wherever and yet, in the Victorian into the 20th century/modern era, because our collective gender was deemed fragile, women were told by medical professionals, not one of whom would ever give birth, to lie down and stay down. Gack. Eve, by Cat Bohannon informs all of this, if you’re interested in the literal biological and cultural history of women, birthing and evolution. This rest in bed prescription, common at the time, most likely killed Becker as the embolism that traveled from her leg to her lungs and heart might have been prevented by the simple act of getting up and walking around post-partum. Sigh.
Becker, known as Modersohn-Becker after her marriage, was the first known woman painter to paint nude self-portraits, and the first woman to have a museum devoted exclusively to her art, the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, founded 1927, in Bremen. Additionally, she is considered to be the first woman artist to depict herself both pregnant and – gasp! – nude and pregnant, which portraits are among the reasons those pesky Nazis considered her and her works degenerate. The primary reason they did, however, was that the Nazis were ignorant, sexist pigs in addition to most of them being conservative misogynistic Catholics.
Her work is revolutionary; Becker was an impressionist, and if you’re interested in taking a look at her paintings, you will be reminded of the work of Cezanne, Mattisse, Pissarro and Manet, artists who did not die in childbirth, and whose work – also impressionistic – is much better known than that of Becker’s, perhaps in part because they lived a lot longer, and in places where the Nazi ideology was a visitor, ‘only’.
The pro-forced birth crowd like to decry abortion because ‘how many doctors have been aborted, docs might have found the cure for cancer!!” Yup, Sure. I know like I know like I know that it is much more likely that actual living women whose opportunities were denied or limited, whose lives were cut short by childbirth, by domestic violence, by a thousand cuts of other kinds were actual losses we can no longer stand. When 50% of a population anywhere at any time is being held back or erased by gender ideology or violence, we all lose.
Paula Becker was a friend of the poet Rainier Maria Rilke, who both wrote and dedicated his poem Requiem for a Friend in her memory on the first anniversary of her death. Her portrait of Rilke is posted below; I love it. Here are two excerpts from that very long poem, although some say it is a letter, and not poetry at all – but, can’t it be both? I think it can, and is:
“I have my dead and I have let them do and was amazed to see them so contented, so at home in being dead, so cheerful, so unlike their reputation. Only you return; brush past me, loiter, try to knock against something, so that the sound reveals your presence. Oh don’t take from me what I am slowly learning. I’m sure you have gone astray if you are moved to homesickness for anything in this dimension. We transform these Things; they aren’t real, they are only the reflections upon the polished surface of our being.”
“If you are still here, if in this darkness there is still a place where your sensitive spirit resonates on the shallow waves of a voice, isolated in the night, vibrating in the high room’s current: then hear me: help me. See, we can slip back so unknowingly, out of our forward stride, into something we didn’t intend: find that we’re trapped there as if in dream and we die there, without waking. No one is far from it. Anyone who has fired their blood through work that endures, may find that they can no longer sustain itand that it falls according to its weight, worthless. For somewhere there is an ancient enmity between life and the great work. Help me, so that I might see it and know it. Come no more. If you can bear it so, be dead among the dead. The dead are occupied. But help me like this, so you are not scattered, as the furthest things sometimes help me: within.” – translator, A.S. Kline
