A pioneer artist who died young is celebrated in a heart-rending story,
Who was Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907)?
Close friend Rainer Maria Rilke, member of the Worpswede artists’ colony, and — as William Yoeman tells us — ‘the French writer Marie Darrieussecq writes of the artist’s nude portraits of other women in her similarly unromantic yet profoundly sympathetic biography of Modersohn-Becker, Being Here:’
“In Paula’s work there are real women. I want to say women who are naked at long last: stripped of the masculine gaze. Women who are not posing in front of a man, who are not seen through the lens of men’s desire, frustration, possessiveness, domination, aggravation.”
Source: A tragic life done justice, by William Yeoman