![]() ![]() If you know Kirchner’s “Self Portrait with Model,” you see how different they are. It’s the painting that stuns a lot of people. But I can’t tell you anything about this.” I’m putting it here because the time is right this is early twentieth century, this is German, and I found her in German museums. McNee said, “I don’t know how this fits, and I can’t tell you anything about it. We were studying early-twentieth-century German Expressionism, and I was dutifully taking notes and trying to get this all under my belt, and I thought I had all the definitions right, and they were all based on Kirchner and Pechstein and Schmidt-Rottluff and a lot of these guys who were somewhat energetic and raw, then- poof!-on the screen comes this Modersohn-Becker. ![]() He’d been in Europe during the Second World War, posted in Germany, and he went to museums and took photographs. It was a course in modern art taught by John McNee, a painter-because the art historians didn’t want to touch anything that was under fifty years old. Radycki: It started with an image in a college classroom, in the late sixties, at the University of Illinois in Chicago. When I sat down recently with Radycki, on the Upper East Side in an apartment crammed with paintings by her late husband, Sidney Tillim, I started by asking how she first became aware of Modersohn-Becker. Radycki performs some sharp detective work to suggest that Picasso’s knowledge of a 1906 Modersohn-Becker portrait played a crucial role in his solving the problem, later that same year, of how to paint the head in his seminal portrait of Gertrude Stein-just one piece of evidence that allows Radycki to call Modersohn-Becker’s story “the missing piece in the history of twentieth-century modernism.” Part of Radycki’s subject is, necessarily, that of how an artist who died in obscurity has been resurrected for later generations-a facet of the story in which Radycki herself played no small part over almost four decades of fascination with the artist. In her introduction, Radycki calls her book a “slightly unconventional monograph of a highly unconventional artist.” The book blends art-historical scholarship and visual analysis with dramatic biographical sketches drawn from the painter’s contemporaneous letters and journals-a “riveting sequence of first-person accounts,” as Radycki puts it, that “reveals the personal cost when one woman genius wants it all-a big career and motherhood-in an era before women had the vote.” That is, until the publication, this year, of the book “Paula Modersohn-Becker: The First Modern Woman Artist,” by the art historian Diane Radycki. As a marketing-minded gallery owner of today might put it, she had quite a story: famous friends (among them the poet Rainer Maria Rilke) a turbulent personal life (her marriage to an older, respected artist, Otto Modersohn, went unconsummated for years, and she had an eyebrow-raising affair that ended badly) struggles against poverty (like Van Gogh, she could never make any money selling her work) and, finally, an early death, at thirty-one, weeks after giving birth to her first and only child.Įfforts at winning for Modersohn-Becker a posthumous American fame cannot be said to have failed, since such efforts were never undertaken. ![]() That an artist of such gifts was a virtual unknown in North America seemed the more amazing given the dramatic details of her short, tragic life. With her bold experiments in subject matter, color, modelling, and brushwork, Modersohn-Becker was among the painters, along with Picasso and Matisse, who created modernism in the first years of the twentieth century. I count among such moments the day, in 1984, when my then-girlfriend (now wife) showed me an obscure, out-of-print monograph she had bought, in the late seventies, in Edmonton, Alberta, of the German modernist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907). Learning about a cult artist-those underappreciated geniuses whose influence on a given art form are not yet widely recognized-is one of life’s great pleasures. Courtesy of Kunsthandel Wolfgang Werner KG, Bremen/Berlin. “Self-Portrait with Amber Necklace” (1906). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |