German expressionist painters – my daily art display

Self Portrait on her Sixth Wedding Anniversary by Paula Modersohn-Becker

My blog today concludes my look at the life of the German Expressionist painter, Paula Becker, later to become Paula Modersohn-Becker. For her early life you should first read my last blog.

As I told you in that last blog, Paula moved to Worpswede and joined the other artists in 1898. The artist colony provided her with a lot of inspiration. She was influenced by resident artists such as Heinrich Vogeler, whose house, the Barkenhoff, was the centre of the artistic community. She became great friends with the young sculptor Clara Westhoff and the poet Rainer Rilke, who in 1901 would marry Clara. She also struck up a friendship with the young German painter Otto Modersohn and his wife Helene. Otto and Helene Schröder had married in 1897 and their daughter Elsbeth was born the following year.

Paula quickly found her own artistic style, painting pictures of withdrawn farm children and elderly ladies whom she painted in poorhouses (see previous blog). Paula from the outset had loved the peace and tranquillity at Worpswede but being still young, for remember, she was only twenty-two when she arrived at the artist colony, she still hankered after the excitement of city life. So after more than twelve months at Worpswede she decided to head for the then art capital of the world – Paris. She left Germany on December 31^st 1899, the last day of the nineteenth century. After settling in Paris she wrote a letter to her mother, in which she commented about the change of scene:

“…I see these Paris trips as a positive addition to the slightly one-sided life I lead here……………After 10 quiet months in Worpswede, I feel that immersing myself in a foreign city with all of its stimuli is something really essential for my life…”

Clara Westhoff and Paula Modersohn-Becker

Paula was not alone in Paris as her friend, the sculptor from Worpswede, Clara Westhoff, had moved there the previous year hoping to study under August Rodin. At first, life in Paris was difficult for Paula. She lived in a small cramped attic room but she still embraced life in Paris with great enthusiasm and was determined to avail herself of an education in the arts, a thing which was still denied to women in Germany at the time. Whilst in the French capital, Paula Becker studied at both the Académie Colarossi and the École des Beaux-Arts, and made numerous visits to the Louvre, all the time taking pleasure in absorbing the artistic life of the city. Through her friend Clara, she met and got to know sculptor Auguste Rodin. She made many visits to contemporary exhibitions and was deeply impressed by the works of the Post-Impressionists especially Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. She was also influenced by the strong colours used by the Fauve artists and the Realism style of Jean-François Millet.

From April to November of 1900, Paris hosted a World Fair, known as the Exposition Universelle. The reason for this great event was to celebrate the achievements of the past century and to accelerate development into the next. Paula invited Otto Modersohn, who was still at Worpswede, to come with his wife and daughter and see the great exposition. Otto Modersohn arrived in Paris in June along with another Worpswede artist, Fritz Overbeck, but he had had to leave his wife behind as she was unwell, suffering from tuberculosis. Tragically she died whilst her husband was still in Paris. He immediately returned to Worpswede to look after his one year old daughter. Paula also returned to Worpswede and during the following year she and Otto Modersohn married and Paula became stepmother to his daughter, Elsbeth.

Paula could not settle back in Worpswede and was determined that she would have to return to Paris if she was to become a serious painter. Her husband was very unhappy with her decision to leave him despite her promising to return to Worpswede on frequent visits. So although married, she abandoned her husband, despite his protestations, and returned to Paris. On arriving in Paris she recorded her thoughts about what the future held for her:

“…Now I have left Otto Modersohn, I stand between my old life and my new one. What will happen in my new life? And how shall I develop in my new life? Everything must happen now…”

These long periods living away from Otto put pressure on their marriage and after a few years the marriage was all but over and they continued to live separate lives. In 1907 she returned to Otto in Worpswede and it appeared that the two had reconciled. Paula became pregnant and bore a child, a daughter Mathilde. Mathilde (Tillie) Modersohn was born on November 2^nd 1907. Otto and Paula were delighted with their new arrival but their joy was short lived as less than three weeks later, on November 20^th 2007, Paula Modersohn-Becker died from a post-natal embolism. She was just thirty-one years of age. Sadly, that same month Paula’s mother died of a heart attack.

My Daily Art Display’s featured painting today is one Paula completed in Paris in May 1906. It is entitled Self Portrait on her Sixth Wedding Anniversary. It is an unusual study as one needs to remember that at the time she painted this picture, she was not pregnant. On the contrary, she had been reported as saying that, at that time in her life, she was not ready to have children and certainly not a child with Otto! So why did she depict herself “with child”? I do not know the answer to that but I read one article the other day in which the author states:

“….Paula was not pregnant in this painting. The painting, then, is a metaphor for how she felt about herself as a young artist: fecund, ripe, able for the first time in her life to create and paint freely in the manner that she wished. What she is about to give birth to is not a child but her mature, independent, artistic self…”

I will let you make your own mind up as to why she would want to depict herself as being pregnant.

In the painting, she has portrayed herself with the distended stomach of a pregnant woman but her breasts are small and pert and lack the fullness one associates with pregnancy. It is a life-size portrayal, measuring 101cms x 70cms. She stands before us, naked to the waist. Her eyes are level with ours. She stares out at us with her large brown eyes. Her auburn hair is parted in the centre and swept up into a chignon. She half smiles. Her expression is one of self-confidence. She appears unabashed by her nakedness as she tilts her head to one side in a questioning gesture. Her only clothing is a white cloth skirt which is loosely tied around her hips below her distended belly. Her large hands lie above and below her belly. It is as if she is framing and showcasing her pregnancy. Around her neck, and lying between her breasts, is a necklace made up of lozenge-shaped amber coloured beads, which subtly glow against her pale skin.

There is a Gauginesque Tahitian look about the painting. It is an unusual and a complex self portrait which she painted on the occasion of her sixth wedding anniversary to Otto Modersohn and we know that, at this time, their marriage was well and truly on the rocks and maybe that is why she signed the painting “PB” for Paula Becker, her maiden name and left out “Modersohn” her married name.

Almost a year after her death, Rainer Maria Rilke, the poet and husband of her friend Clara Westhoff wrote the poem Requiem for a Friend in memory of Paula. The poem itself is too long to add to this blog but I have attached the website URL below if you would like to read the full translation of this very moving poem.

http://www.paratheatrical.com/requiemtext.html

Her daughter Tillie, who died in 1998, aged 91, founded the Paula Modersohn-Becker-Foundation (Paula Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung) in 1978. The Paula-Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen has the distinction of being the first museum devoted to the work of a female painter. Early in the 20th century, the patron and merchant Ludwig Roselius amassed a collection of the artist’s major works and this along with works from the Paula Modersohn-Becker Foundation bear out her importance as a pioneer of modern painting.

In 1988 a stamp with the portrait of Paula Modersohn-Becker was issued in the series Women in German History by the German

Old Peasant Woman Praying by Paula Modersohn-Becker

Old Peasant Woman by Paukla Modersohn-Becker (1905) — Old Peasant Woman Praying by Paukla Modersohn-Becker (1905)

In My Daily Art Display of July 28^th 2012, I looked at the life and works of the German Expressionist painter, Gabriele Münter and in my next two blogs I want to showcase the life and feature a couple of the works of art of another early German Expressionist artist, Paula Modersohn-Becker. She may not be familiar to some of you but I am sure you will find her life story interesting, if a little sad, and her artwork unusual.

: Paula Modersohn-Becker

Paula Becker was born in Friedrichstadt, a central district of Dresden in 1876. She was born into a cultural middle-class family, the third of seven children. Her father, who was the son of a Russian university professor, had been a government railroad official but had had to take early retirement on health grounds and her mother was the daughter of an aristocratic family. When Paula was twelve years of age she and her family moved to Bremen. In 1892, when she was sixteen years of age, she travelled to London to stay with one of her father’s sisters. During her seven month stay in England she received her first drawing lessons. Paula loved drawing and painting and wanted to become an artist but her father, mindful of the poor financial rewards of being an artist, insisted that first she must enrol on and complete a two-year teachers’ training course before he would allow her to follow her dream of becoming a painter and study at the Berlin School of Women Artists. She attended the teachers’ training college in 1893 and completed the course two years later. During this two year period she received drawing and painting lessons from the German painter and stage designer, Bernhardt Wiegandt.

Just a few miles north of Paula’s Bremen home was the small village of Worpswede, which is situated in the Teufelsmoor, a region of bog and moorland. It was to play a large part in Paula’s life as it had become the home of an artistic community. It all began in 1884 when Mimi Stolte, the daughter of a shopkeeper in Worpswede, whilst staying with her aunt in Düsseldorf, met Fritz Mackensen, a young art student at the city’s Art Academy and since he was virtually penniless, she took pity on him and invited him to Worpswede to spend the holidays with her family. After that, he visited her on a number of occasions and liked the area so much that, in 1889, he made it his home and soon, along with his artist friends, Otto Modersohn and Hans am Ende, founded the artists’ colony of Worpswede. Other artists, writers and poets soon descended on the small town and in 1895 the “Kunsthalle Bremen” exhibited works by artists from Worpswede for the first time.

In 1896 Paula Becker enrolled on a painting and drawing course run by the Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen (Union of Berlin Female Artists) which offered art studies to women. Following this she began a one-and-a half-year apprenticeship. At first she concentrated on drawing lessons with portrait and nude studies and later she studied painting under the tutorship of the Swedish/German painter, Jeanna Bauck. The following year, Paula Becker visited the artist colony at Worpswede for the first time and met the German painter, Fritz Mackensen, who became her art tutor. In 1898 Paula left home and went to live in Worpswede and worked alongside the other artists. During this period she completed many works depicting women and children of the farming community and for models she would use the local peasant women and their children as well as getting some of the old women from the local poor house to pose for her. She also completed some landscape works, which depicted the desolate and dark moors which surrounded the Worpswede area. These moors were crossed by a number of canals used by barges for transporting locally harvested peat moss to Bremen. The artist colony painters of Worpswede believed in and promoted a romanticized view of country life, which they believed was a powerful antidote to the revulsion they felt for urban industrialization. Paula however thought differently and rejected the sentimental approach of her fellow artists, believing that a basically realistic subject could better represent profound spiritual values. Although there was a kind of peace and tranquillity at Worpswede she still hankered after the excitement of city life. So after more than twelve months at Worpswede she decided to head for the art capital of the world – Paris. She left Germany on December 31^st 1899, the last day of the nineteenth century.

My Daily Art Display featured painting today is entitled Old Peasant Woman Praying which Paula Becker completed in 1905. There is a kind of Primitivism to this painting similar to what we have seen in Gaugin’s works. The woman has her large lumpish peasant hands crossed over her chest in a meditative prayer-like manner. There is a religious feel to this work. One cannot say for sure what is in the background. Could it be the coping of a wall with a large leafed tree in the background or is it just a flower/leaf-patterned wall. However note how the artist has interrupted the background with brightness around the head of the peasant, almost halo-like, giving her a kind of spirituality. She has a weather-beaten face from the continuous hours spent outside working in the unforgiving sunlight. The painting is of a lower-class peasant woman and yet it is not a condescending painting. There is a certain dignity about this woman. This was never just a peasant painting which was meant to entertain the elite. This is quite different to the way Van Gogh depicted his peasants in The Potato Eaters (See My Daily Art Display February 7^th 2012). Paula has given her subject a modicum of respect and by doing so has created a beautiful work of art.

In my next blog I will tell you more about Paula Becker’s life, her marriage to Otto Modersohn and her untimely death and feature some more of her works of art.

The Night by Max Beckmann

Today I am exploring the unusual world of Expressionism, to be more precise, German Expressionism, and will be looking at a painting entitled The Night by the German artist Max Beckmann, who was one of the most important German painters of the 20^th century. Beckmann has always been compartmentalised as an Expressionist painter but he himself, railed against that tag.

Expressionism materialized in different artistic circles across Europe but its zenith was the period between 1905 and 1920. Expressionism as a general term refers to art in which the image of reality is more or less heavily distorted in formand colour in order to make it expressive of the artist’s inner feelings or ideas about it. In expressionist art the colours used were often strong and highly intense and often non-naturalistic. The brushwork is typically free and paint application tends to be generous and highly textured. Expressionist art inclined to be poignant and sometimes had mystical qualities. It would often look at themes of belonging and alienation. In some ways Expressionism was the art of unrest and the search for truth. The German Expressionists were loosely gathered in two groups. One was called Die Brücke (The Bridge) and the other was Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). There are numerous well known artists who could be looked upon as Expressionist artists. The ones who come to mind are Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch, Wassiliy Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Beckmann just to mention a few.

Max Beckmann was born in Leipzig in 1884, the youngest of three children. His family were of a middle-class background. His father was a grain merchant but died when Max was just ten years of age. He received a thorough education and spent several years at a boarding school. At the age of fifteen and despite family objections, he decided on an artistic career and applied to the Königliche Akademie in Dresden but failed the entrance exam. In 1900, aged sixteen years of age, his artistic studies finally began with his enrolment at the Weimar Saxon-Grand Ducal Art School for a three-year course and it was here that he learned to draw from antique statues and eventually progressed to human models. It was also at the Academy that he met fellow art student, Minna Tube, whom he married three years later. They went on to have a son, Peter. After the course ended in 1903 he went to Paris where he studied at the private Académie Colarossi, which was an alternative art institution to the government-sanctioned École des Beaux-Arts that had, in the eyes of many promising young artists at the time, become far too conservative. In 1906, he was in Florence financed by winning the German art prize, the Villa Romana Prize and it was in this Italian city he was able to study the works of the great Masters. The following year, he moved to Berlin and three years later in 1907 he participated in the Berlin Secession, which was the predominant voice of modern German painting. The term Secession, which came from the Latin secessio plebis (the revolt of the plebeians against the patricians) was the term applied to groups of artists who secede from academic bodies or associations in protest at the constraints. The three main Secessions were those of Berlin, Munich and Vienna. The Berlin Secession was founded by Berlin artists in 1898 as an alternative to the conservative state-run Association of Berlin Artists.

Beckmann’s paintings from this period are characterized by the legacy of Impressionism, with landscapes and beach scenes painted with stippled brushstrokes which evoked the play of light across shapes. He was held in such high regard by his colleagues that, in 1910, he was elected to the executive board of the Secession and was the youngest member ever to achieve such a distinction. However because he preferred painting to policy making, he resigned the following year in order to devote himself full-time to his art work. Conflict within the Berlin Secession eventually led to a further schism in 1910 and the new group called itself the Neue Secession (New Secession). In 1914 the rejection of works by some members of the Berlin Secession again led to further disagreements and several artists, including Beckmann left the Berlin Secession to found the Berlin Freie Secession (Berlin Free Secession), which existed until 1924.

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Beckmann volunteered as a medical orderly and served time on the Belgium front. Before the onset of war, he, like many other Germans, rationalized the necessity of war and believed in their countries aims. He believed war could cleanse the individual and society. However, after experiencing day after day the widespread destruction and horrors of the war, he became disillusioned with the conflict and rejected the glory of military service. In 1915 the dreadfulness of what he witnessed took its toll on him and he suffered a nervous breakdown and was moved to Belgium and later Frankfurt.

Following World War I, his work changed radically in reaction to the horrors he had witnessed. Initially he focused on biblical scenes, but during the 1920s he created more contemporary allegories and painted devastatingly realistic portraits and figure paintings associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) group, with whom he exhibited in 1925, but never formally joined. He now rejected traditional perspective and proportion creating taut, airless pictorial structure of space and planes with an absence of bright colour and thick brushstrokes of Expressionism. He saw the world as a tragedy of man’s inhumanity to man and saw life as a carnival of human folly. In 1925 his marriage to Minna Tube, which had slowly been unravelling, came to an end and the couple were divorced. That same year he married his second wife, Mathilde von Kaulbach and he was appointed professor at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt.

In 1933 the Nazis came to power and Beckmann was declared a “degenerate artist”. He was dismissed from his post at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut and a ban was placed on all his exhibitions. All his works in German museums were confiscated. The Nazi art policy at the time applied to everything that did not conform to Nazi goals. It was their battle against what they termed überfremdung (foreign infiltration). He moved from Frankfurt to Berlin where he believed due to its size and large population he could become more anonymous. In 1937 he moved to Amsterdam where he lived in poverty in self-imposed exile failing in his desperate attempts to obtain a visa for the US. He remained there until 1948 at which time he was finally granted a US visa. From there he and his wife moved to the USA and he took up a post at the School of Fine Arts, Washington University in St Louis. Later he moved to New York where he was given a professorship at the Art School of Brooklyn Museum.

Max Beckmann died of a heart attack whilst out walking in Manhattan, the day after Boxing Day in 1950. He was aged 66. His wife, Mathilde, died six years later.

My featured painting today entitled The Night was painted by Max Beckmann during 1918 and 1919. It is housed at the Kunstammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf. This is an early example of Beckmann’s grotesque and appalling visionary paintings with its misshapen figures. Before us we have an overcrowded room in a modern city. Beckman himself said he wanted this work to be looked upon as a large modern history painting tinged with a sense of evil. Three men have invaded the room and are terrorising the occupants. The man to the left has been hung by the neck by one of the intruders while a man with a bandaged head, wearing waistcoat and tie and smoking a pipe, twists his arm. Two women can also be seen in the scene. One, in the central foreground with her back to us, possibly the man’s wife, wears red stockings and is bound to a post after having been raped. The second woman whose feet we can just make out at the top right of the painting, is held upside down by a man whose hat resembles the type worn by Lenin. To the right a blonde-haired child is about to be dragged off. Under the table we see an old phonograph, the sound from which may have been used to blot out the cries from those being tortured. Also partly under the table on the left we see a dog whose head is raised as he howls for help. This is a scene of urban hell, an unfathomable and vile scene.

In his book Max Beckmann, Stephen Lackner commented on this work saying:

“… Beckmann sees no purpose in the suffering he shows; there is no glory for anybody, no compensation, … Beckmann blames human nature as such, and there seems to be no physical escape from this overwhelming self-accusation. Victims and aggressors alike are cornered. There is no exit…”

Maybe, one should remember that 1918 was the time of the German November Revolution which resulted in the replacement of Germany’s imperial government with a republic and which unleashed tremendous savagery and terror across the country. In 1919 there followed a general strike which was brutally put down by the authorities. Maybe in some way Beckmann, in his painting, was alluding to such horrors perpetrated by mankind on mankind. I find it very hard to fathom the state of the artist’s mind when he was painting this work. Had he personally suffered so much mentally and lost all hope in humanity to depict such violence?