She worked at fever pitch,producing 80 pictures in a year, and was dead by 31 an intense and fragmentary account of a unique artist by Marie DarrieussecqPaula Modersohn-Becker was the first woman to paint a naked self-portrait – and while apparently pregnant, or at that – in 1906. She worked at fever pitch,bemoaning the waste of her first two decades and producing in her penultimate summer a portray every four or five days. Regularly described as an expressionist, her portraits don’t look like anything or anyone else. Her women are crude and exact, or glowing with strange colours: Balthus as a feminist,Gauguin by way of The sad Crystal. She died in 1907 at the age of 31, having sold three paintings in her lifetime, and leaving behind a forest of letters and diaries.
Marie Darrieussecq,a French writer best known in the UK for her startling 1996 debut novel Pig Tales, first came across Modersohn-Becker in an email in her junk folder, and illustrated with a small picture of a woman breastfeeding. It was so unfamiliar it stopped her in her tracks. She couldn’t understand why she didn’t already know approximately this German artist who painted real women,real behaviour with such confident frankness. Why was she not exhibited in Paris, the city she had made her domestic? “effect we have to assume that she did not have her universal visa?”Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk