{"id":116952,"date":"2017-10-23T13:00:12","date_gmt":"2017-10-23T17:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=116952"},"modified":"2017-10-23T14:16:43","modified_gmt":"2017-10-23T18:16:43","slug":"reappearing-women-a-conversation-between-marie-darrieussecq-and-kate-zambreno","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/23\/reappearing-women-a-conversation-between-marie-darrieussecq-and-kate-zambreno\/","title":{"rendered":"Reappearing Women: A Conversation Between Marie Darrieussecq and Kate Zambreno"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Paula Modersohn-Becker, Liegende Mutter mit Kind II<\/em> (Reclining Mother with Child II<\/em>), 1906, oil on canvas,\u00a032 1\/2 in. \u00d7 49 1\/10 in.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The novelist Marie Darrieussecq\u2019s slim, enigmatic biography of the German Expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, <\/i>Being Here Is Everything<\/a>, opens with the author\u2019s visit to the house in which Paula lived with her husband, Otto. \u201cShe was here,\u201d Darrieussecq writes. \u201cOn Earth and in her house.\u201d It is a statement of fact that conjures Modersohn-Becker, who died in 1907 at age thirty-one, into being once more. That opening sentence sits in\u00a0counterpoint to the book\u2019s epigraph, from Rilke\u2019s <\/i>Duino Elegies: \u201cBeing here is wondrous.\u201d Rilke\u2019s claim arrives with easy certitude; Darrieussecq\u2019s with authorial entreaty.<\/i><\/p>\n

In <\/em>Being Here, Darrieussecq has drawn a complete, if elliptical, portrait of Modersohn-Becker\u2019s short life\u2014her close friendship with the sculptor Clara Westhoff and with Rilke, her marriage to the painter Otto Modersohn, her lifelong insistence on the ability to paint and to have a corner of solitude in which to do it. \u201cI try to see where her strength resides,\u201d Darrieussecq thinks while looking at a photograph of Paula. \u201cShe is staring into space. Open and thoughtful. It is the photograph of a woman who paints, alone, whose paintings are not seen.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

In reconstituting Modersohn-Becker\u2019s life, Darrieussecq also illuminates a broader problem for\u00a0women artists. Later in the book, she visits the Museum Folkwang, in Essen, Germany, to see Modersohn-Becker\u2019s self-portrait and is taken to a \u201ctemporary display\u201d in the museum\u2019s basement. \u201cUpstairs,\u201d she recalls, \u201cwell lit: Van Gogh, C\u00e9zanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Kirchner, Nolde, Kandinsky, Klee. Downstairs, in the shadows: a mess of statues from antiquity mixed up with contemporary videos. Goddesses, mother-and-child paintings, queens: the only connecting thread is that these works are by women <\/em>or represent women.\u201d The neat\u00a0separation\u00a0of modernist masters from\u00a0the full historical sweep of women\u2019s art\u2014a literal high and low\u2014encapsulates centuries of thwarted ambition.<\/em><\/p>\n

Being Here\u00a0was published in France last year and was released last month in an English translation by Penny Hueston. Darrieussecq spoke with the writer Kate Zambreno over the phone earlier this fall. Zambreno recently published <\/em>Book of Mutter<\/a>, a meditation on writing, grief, and motherhood.\u00a0She also became a mother some nine months ago; her baby\u2019s cries punctuated their conversation about the process of reviving Modersohn-Becker\u2019s reputation, motherhood and art, and women\u2019s friendships.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014Nicole Rudick<\/em><\/p>\n

ZAMBRENO<\/p>\n

What was your first encounter with Paula?<\/p>\n

DARRIEUSSECQ<\/p>\n

It was on the Internet, actually. I received a spam email for a colloquium about psychoanalysis and motherhood. There was a stamp-size painting of a woman nursing but lying on her side. That was the best position\u2014for me, at least\u2014to nurse, but I never had seen that position in a painting. I discovered that it was by Paula Modersohn-Becker, and I wondered why she is so unknown.<\/p>\n

ZAMBRENO<\/p>\n

I encountered her through Adrienne Rich\u2019s poem about the friendship between Paula and Clara Westhoff, Rich\u2019s answer to Rilke\u2019s \u201cRequiem for a Friend.\u201d<\/p>\n

DARRIEUSSECQ<\/p>\n

And Rilke dedicated his \u201cRequiem\u201d to Paula.<\/p>\n

ZAMBRENO<\/p>\n

But she\u2019s unnamed in it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

DARRIEUSSECQ<\/p>\n

Paula\u2019s friendship with Rilke was complex. My opinion is that she was the only woman who didn\u2019t sleep with him. She flirted with him a lot, but since she was already engaged to Otto, who was to become her husband, she only flirted. And she was best friends with Clara, and Rilke was in love with both of them\u2014the tall brunette and the small blonde.<\/p>\n

ZAMBRENO<\/p>\n

The two girls in white, as he characterized them.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Becker (before she married) with Clara Westhoff, in the former\u2019s atelier, in 1899.<\/p><\/div>\n

DARRIEUSSECQ<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the clich\u00e9d fantasy of a young man at the beginning of the twentieth century. Paula and Clara are young, they seem like virgins, they are smart, they are beautiful, they dance very well, they are educated, but not too much, so they\u2019re absolutely perfect. He had just been dumped by Lou Andreas-Salom\u00e9, who was much older and who knew much more about life, and so he was quite unhappy. Then he discovers these two young girls. Paula is already engaged, and Clara, I think, sleeps with him quite soon, because she\u2019s very pregnant when they get married. Their marriage is a disaster of course. When Clara had her baby, Rilke just left the house, he couldn\u2019t stand it, he couldn\u2019t stand the baby\u2019s crying, the baby prevented him from writing, blah blah blah \u2026<\/p>\n

ZAMBRENO<\/p>\n

I was working on a story on Rilke when I was pregnant\u2014Rilke in his farmhouse unable to write, Rilke in Paris, working on Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge<\/i>\u2014but I was haunted by Paula. There was something about Paula\u2019s story, and Clara\u2019s, that feels unfinished.<\/p>\n

DARRIEUSSECQ<\/p>\n

Absolutely. The pictures we have of Paula, too, are haunting. She\u2019s melancholy, this woman in the photos, and she died so early.<\/p>\n

ZAMBRENO<\/p>\n

She died holding her baby daughter, and her last word was Schade<\/em>\u2014\u201ca pity.\u201d It\u2019s incredibly tragic.<\/p>\n

DARRIEUSSECQ<\/p>\n

That\u2019s one of the reasons I wanted to write her biography\u2014to give her a bit more life, some justice. She died leaving an eighteen-day-old baby. A shame, yes. A pity.<\/p>\n

ZAMBRENO<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a line in Adrienne Rich\u2019s poem that every pregnant woman dreams her own death. What\u2019s fascinating about Paula is that she painted mothers and pregnancy and babies so lovingly and in such a different way, but she was extremely ambivalent about her own pregnancy, about her own domesticity and impending marriage, especially as it relates to her freedom and art making.<\/p>\n

DARRIEUSSECQ<\/p>\n

She\u2019s a complex woman, and her ambivalence about having a baby is very modern. Whether she wanted a baby or not, she did want to paint. She wanted to paint more than she wanted a baby, I think, but the fact that she painted babies \u2026 She doesn\u2019t paint the Virgin and the baby, she paints the mother and the baby. And it\u2019s not erotic, it\u2019s not a man\u2019s vision. It\u2019s a woman\u2019s vision of women who are not Madonnas and not prostitutes. It\u2019s not <\/b>Manet\u2019s Olympia<\/i>, and it\u2019s not the Madonna of the Renaissance. At the Louvre, there is work by only four women but thousands and thousands of paintings of<\/i> women.<\/p>\n

Paula was also the first to paint herself naked. I\u2019m sure she did it because models were too expensive, and she didn\u2019t want to ask her husband for more money. They\u2019re not sensual paintings, it\u2019s a dialogue with herself. And when she paints herself pregnant and she\u2019s not pregnant, it\u2019s so ambivalent.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Paula Modersohn-Becker, Selbstbildnis am 6. Hochzeitstag<\/em> (Self-Portrait on the sixth wedding anniversary<\/em>), tempera on canvas, 40.1 in \u00d7 27.6 in.<\/p><\/div>\n

ZAMBRENO<\/p>\n

That\u2019s her most famous self-portrait, with the amber necklace, where she appears to be pregnant but in reality was not yet pregnant. There are many interpretations of what this might mean. What do you think of that painting?<\/p>\n

DARRIEUSSECQ<\/p>\n

She had been married for six years and had just left her husband\u2014May 1906. She\u2019s alone in Paris and she paints herself pregnant, and the signature says, \u201cI painted this at the age of thirty, on my sixth wedding anniversary.\u201d I think she\u2019s fantasizing about having a baby\u2014like, How would I look pregnant? We all did this\u2014you know, putting cushions under sweaters. She painted herself with a big belly, thinking, How would that be? Good or not? With him or not?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t really know. It\u2019s a fiction, but it\u2019s beautiful. Every time she paints herself naked, she\u2019s smiling, and I like that, because the rest of her paintings are very often \u2026 not sad but serious, melancholy. In that painting, she looks not naughty but \u2026 it\u2019s full of irony.<\/p>\n

ZAMBRENO<\/p>\n

Yes, it\u2019s a very direct gaze. But a different gaze, than, say, in Manet\u2019s Olympia<\/i>. She looks amused with herself.<\/p>\n

DARRIEUSSECQ<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t think of another naked self-portrait by a woman at that point. She did something that no one did before her.<\/p>\n

ZAMBRENO<\/p>\n

In my mind, I always place that self-portrait next to the photograph Diane Arbus took of herself in the mirror when she\u2019s quite young and in the early stages of pregnancy. There\u2019s something similar in both of their expressions.<\/p>\n

DARRIEUSSECQ<\/p>\n

I also compare her to Francesca Woodman, who made naked self-portraits that never sentimentalize. Suzanne Valadon, another great painter, painted herself naked ten years later, in 1916, in Paris.<\/p>\n

ZAMBRENO<\/p>\n

The other artist I think of who painted pregnant women was Klimt.<\/p>\n

DARRIEUSSECQ<\/p>\n

Yes, and Egon Schiele.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

ZAMBRENO<\/p>\n

I love walking around the early Netherlandish rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I like looking at the paintings of lactating virgins. The poses are so awkward\u2014the erect, high breast, the stiff and rigid seating position.<\/p>\n

DARRIEUSSECQ<\/p>\n

Yes! And the position in Paula Becker\u2019s painting Reclining Mother and Child<\/i> is very interesting again. The sensuality between mother and baby\u2014they\u2019re languid, and they look very much asleep. When she could afford it, she hired Italian models in Paris because Italians were recent migrants, they were very poor, and they accepted being painted naked. Sometimes she felt ashamed painting women naked, but she needed to do it. She had learned to paint nudes by looking at corpses because female students weren\u2019t allowed to paint from live models in Germany. Only men were allowed to. Paris was the only city where female students were allowed to paint naked models and learn anatomy.<\/p>\n

ZAMBRENO<\/p>\n

You and I emailed a little bit about early motherhood and boredom and its relationship to art making and the intellect. When I think about nursing and that period of early motherhood, it\u2019s this trancelike laziness. I read a lot when I was nursing. For me, it was a fluid, ongoing period. I always tried to have books scattered around, so I could read wherever I sat down. I picked up things here and there, like Kafka\u2019s diaries. I really identified with Clara and Paula during this time. [Baby crying in background.<\/i>]<\/p>\n

DARRIEUSSECQ<\/p>\n

Clara was interrupted\u2014that\u2019s the word in my mind when I read her letters. She loved her baby, but she also wanted to do something else. She wanted to ride her bicycle, as she writes Paula, and she couldn\u2019t because her child\u2019s father was completely absent.<\/p>\n

ZAMBRENO<\/p>\n

That passage about the bicycle, in her letters to Paula, I find so devastating. It\u2019s a desire for the most basic freedom\u2014being able to go where she wants. Paula wasn\u2019t very receptive to Clara\u2019s feelings of oppression, home alone with the baby. She felt that Clara had broken with her and\u00a0gone in with Rilke, had shut her out of their threesome. How could Clara complain that she was trapped inside, that she just wanted to go ride her bicycle? Their friendship was so beautiful and intense and sad, these two women artists alienated from each other.<\/p>\n

DARRIEUSSECQ<\/p>\n

Paula thought Clara forsook all her power and her creativity for marriage and motherhood. She didn\u2019t understand her friend\u2019s suffering. And Clara\u2019s money problems\u2014she had no idea of that. They were too proud to speak about it. Clara gave the baby to her parents for a year, after which the baby didn\u2019t recognize her.<\/p>\n

ZAMBRENO<\/p>\n

Clara is often erased in this narrative, which is usually focused on Rilke, even in Rilke\u2019s own elegy to Paula.<\/p>\n

DARRIEUSSECQ<\/p>\n

Because the information about her is very scarce. I learned that she traveled to Paris and to Egypt and when she returned, she took her baby back. I also learned that she and her daughter lived together in a very small village, and she died in 1953 and, well, that was it. She didn\u2019t make any more art.<\/p>\n

ZAMBRENO<\/p>\n

She\u2019s a ghost in your text, she flutters in the margins.<\/p>\n

DARRIEUSSECQ<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a rather typical feminine destiny. Paula is less typical in a way, but Clara is completely erased.<\/p>\n

ZAMBRENO<\/p>\n

Clara had studied with Rodin, even before Rilke was his secretary, and she wrote a monograph on him. She had very serious aspirations as a sculptor.<\/p>\n

DARRIEUSSECQ<\/p>\n

She was very promising\u2014she seemed more powerful than Paula. She did not resist marriage. Marriage killed her.<\/p>\n

ZAMBRENO<\/p>\n

How did this book come about? Didn\u2019t it begin as a catalogue essay for a museum exhibition in Paris of Paula\u2019s work? [Baby crying in background.<\/i>]<\/p>\n

DARRIEUSSECQ<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t want to write a biography, I wanted to write a novel, something completely different. But you know, when an idea persists in your mind, and you wake up with the idea, and you go to bed with the idea \u2026 She wouldn\u2019t leave me in peace, so I had to write something about her. And I went to Bremen to find information.<\/p>\n

In the middle of writing the book, I felt I needed to show her paintings in an exhibition. I went to the big museums in Paris, with postcards in hand, but they didn\u2019t want to do it, she wasn\u2019t well-enough known. Until the Museum of Modern Art\u2014and it was the perfect place. The show ran for more than six months, and it reached twice the audience they expected. It was a big success, and my essay was part of the catalogue.<\/p>\n

ZAMBRENO<\/p>\n

What was your relationship with Paula throughout the process?<\/p>\n

DARRIEUSSECQ<\/p>\n

She was like a dead friend. It was not exactly a passion. I like fiction, I write novels. A biography is a bit more restrained\u2014you have to tell what you know, so I didn\u2019t have to imagine. In the beginning, I thought I was going to do a novel, but I wanted to have this woman known, not my imagination of her. She was not a ghost, she was like a dead woman, and I wanted to honor her memory. When you love somebody, you want the other people you know to love her, too.<\/p>\n

ZAMBRENO<\/p>\n

You call her Paula in your book, but you refer to Rilke as Rilke.<\/p>\n

DARRIEUSSECQ<\/p>\n

Because women have no name. She didn\u2019t like to call herself Modersohn because that was Otto\u2019s name, and when she left him, it was not her name anymore. Becker was her father\u2019s name, and it was a very common name. When she left Otto, she signed her letters \u201cPaula,\u201d with a question mark. And that\u2019s the point\u2014her name is Paula. No one calls him Rainer Maria. It\u2019s the truth about men and women. It still is. It\u2019s hard to have a name when you\u2019re a woman.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  The novelist Marie Darrieussecq\u2019s slim, enigmatic biography of the German Expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, Being Here Is Everything, opens with the author\u2019s visit to the house in which Paula lived with her husband, Otto. \u201cShe was here,\u201d Darrieussecq writes. \u201cOn Earth and in her house.\u201d It is a statement of fact that conjures Modersohn-Becker, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[1628,19903,31191,7379,16651,26796,25310,11780,31192,17759,847,1572,31193,3708,67,31190,31208,11597,160,227,31194],"class_list":["post-116952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-adrienne-rich","tag-auguste-rodin","tag-clara-westhoff","tag-diane-arbus","tag-egon-schiele","tag-francesca-woodman","tag-gustav-klimt","tag-kate-zambreno","tag-lou-andreas-salome","tag-manet","tag-marie-darrieussecq","tag-motherhood","tag-notebooks-of-malte-laurids-brigge","tag-olympia","tag-painting","tag-paula-modersohn-becker","tag-penny-hueston","tag-pregnancy","tag-rainer-maria-rilke","tag-self-portrait","tag-suzanne-valadon"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nReappearing Women: A Conversation Between Marie Darrieussecq and Kate Zambreno 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