Being Here Is Everything: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
Staff Reviews
The first decade of the 20th century was a pivotal time in the development of painting – color takes on a life of its own and becomes increasingly the point of painting. Expressionism, cubism, futurism, all evolve in this first decade – mostly in Paris in the neighborhood of Montparnasse. Paula Modersohn-Becker was there, with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (who worked as a secretary for Rodin for a time). The brilliance of this small bio book is that it reads like a biopic, but a really good biopic. Comprised of short snippets, crosscuts and jump cuts, which carefully cover the artist’s life, it reads like a film. The author, (bestselling in France) Marie Darrieussecq, adds personal tidbits (her affinity to the artist’s life) and superfluous information (what they often ordered to eat at a specific café) and footnotes (=well researched.) The factual combines with the personal to create a fluid and intriguing portrait of a young woman artist trying to achieve recognition independently in a rapidly changing world before WWI. She struggled financially. She became the first woman to paint a self-portrait in the nude. Her other work is praised for its use of color. Unfortunately, choosing the security of married life over her precarious bohemian-artist life, ended up leading to her early death following childbirth. Like Van Gogh, she sold only few paintings in her lifetime, but her fame grew despite her early death. Sales of her published letters have sold well over the last 90 years and in Bremen a museum was built in 1927, (the first devoted to a female artist). If you don’t know her, she is here, she was there, and the book is poignant and personalized testament to her legacy. (click here see her artwork)
Description
The short, obscure, and prolific life of the German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907), a significant figure in modernism.
First published in France in 2016, Being Here Is So Much traces the short, obscure, and prolific life of the German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907). In a brief career, cut short by her death from an embolism at the age of thirty-one, shortly after she gave birth to a child, Modersohn-Becker trained in Germany, traveled often to Paris, developed close friendships with the sculptor Clara Westhoff and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and became one of her generation's preeminent artists, helping introduce modernity to the twentieth century alongside such other painters as Picasso and Matisse.
Marie Darrieussecq's triumphant and illuminating biography at once revives Modersohn-Becker's reputation as a significant figure in modernism and sheds light on the extreme difficulty women have faced in attaining recognition and establishing artistic careers.
Praise for Being Here Is Everything: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
Best Book on Art 2016—Lire magazine—
A biography full of life force, drafted in the present with grace... Dazzling!
—Elle—
A magnetic portrait of a woman, taking shape through the seemingly simple, but always so beautiful, writing of Marie Darrieussecq.
—Vogue—
Between the lines, this very beautiful text is read as a feminist manifesto, that constantly questions the place for women in art.
—Les Inrockuptibles—
Darrieussecq's writing is poetic and stylized; the tableau unfolds sometimes in one-sentence paragraphs and one-word sentences, and always in the present tense. Clearly written for a broad audience, this book will renew appreciation for a deserving artist who's too often reduced to a mere passing mention in art-history textbooks.
—Publishers Weekly—
Being Here is Everything should be read less as a definitive biography than as a tender, interpretative meditation by Darrieussecq. Through her interpretive paraphrasing of the artist's words, her textual narration of the paintings, and her omission of any visual reproductions of them (as well as of most of their titles), Darrieussecq writes a specific version of Modersohn-Becker's life. Though not a book of rigorous scholarship, she nonetheless makes a compelling and lyrical case for resuscitating Modersohn-Becker's reputation, and for exposing her paintings to a wider audience. As at long last we begin to color in the annals of art history with artists who once sat outside the traditional canon, the tapestry becomes all the more vivid with the inclusion of Modersohn-Becker's work.
—Brooklyn Rail—
Darrieussecq writes about her subject with a vibrant, urgent present tense-ness, as though Becker herself is unfolding before us. In prose propelled by temperamental rhythms—some paragraphs are half a page long, while others are but a single sentence—Darrieussecq composes a flickering tale that accounts for the artist's life, for the odd space of grief she feels for the artist she never knew but loves, and for the art Becker might have made.
—4Columns—
In Darrieussecq's hands, Modersohn-Becker's story is both individual and exemplary: a frightening, energising fable that weirdly resembles a 19th-century version of Viv Albertine's punk memoir Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, with Sid Vicious recast as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Paula Becker began to draw seriously at the age of 16.
—Olivia Laing, The Guardian—
