Paula Modersohn-Becker

Why did thousands of nineteenth-century artists leave the established urban centers of culture to live and work in the countryside? By 1900, there were over eighty rural artists’ communities across northern and central Europe. This is the first book to offer a critical analysis of this important phenomenon on a Europe-wide basis. Nina Lübbren combines close visual readings of little-known paintings with an innovative multidisciplinary approach, drawing on sociology, geography, and theories of tourism.

Rural artists’ colonies have been unjustly neglected by an art history preoccupied with the urban avant-garde. Yet these communities hatched some of the most exciting innovations of late nineteenth-century painting. Moreover, the practices and images of rural artists articulated central concerns of urban middle-class audiences, in particular the yearning for a nostalgia-imbued life that was considered authentic, premodern, and immersed in nature. Paradoxically, it was precisely this perception that placed artists’ colonies firmly within modernity, mainly through their contribution to an emergent mass tourism.

This article considers examples of female nudes produced by women artists between 1870 and 1920 in the light of their artistic training, with particular reference to the life-class.  It also addresses other significant educational influences that affected these artists as well as  factors in their personal lives that made it important for them to seek artistic expression in the female nude. 
In the 19th century, the female nude became the dominant vision of nudity, embodying abstract notions of ideal beauty.  It has been said that mastering these portrayals was not only crucial for artistic success but also ‘central to the construction of artistic identity’, but in any event, for centuries, perfection in the depiction of the nude form was perceived as one of the pinnacles, perhaps the pinnacle, of an academic art education, and the life-class was central to achieving this goal. As social and educational change was gaining momentum, more women began to participate in the art world and in 1871 the British census recorded 1,069 professional women artists, whereas in 1841 there had been only 278. By 1871, after a reluctant start, the Royal Academy had admitted a total of 117 women to its Schools, and yet it continued to keep the doors of the life-class firmly shut to them.  Ambitious women artists felt this exclusion keenly and began to demand access to the life-class – or at least to a draped nude.  As Linda Nochlin, the first feminist writer to explore ‘the Question of the Nude’, pointed out: ‘To be deprived of this ultimate stage of training, meant, in effect to be deprived of the possibility of creating major art works, unless one were a very ingenious lady indeed.’

This article explores the explores the obstacles women artists had to overcome and the strategies they deployed in their attempts to do so.

WONDER WOMEN: SOFONISBA ANGUISSOLA, LAVINIA FONTANA AND ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI
A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF RENAISSANCE AND BAROQUE SELF-PORTRAIT PAINTING BY FEMALE ARTISTS

by Rosa Lena Reed Robinson

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Master of Arts in Art History at
Studio Art Centers International
Florence, Italy

2017


This  thesis is focused on the self-portrait painting practice by three female artists from the Renaissance and the Baroque periods: Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, and Artemisia Gentileschi. Chapter I introduces the self-portrait as it developed specific to the Renaissance and in relation to a Greco-Roman classical ideal. The chapter focuses on Renaissance concepts of art and the very role of the artist. Chapter II studies the numerous self-portraits of Sofonisba Anguissola, the first great Renaissance female artist to have an international career. The artist’s self-portraits both became a foundation for those of later female artists and self-consciously expressed the new elite status achieved by this Lombard artist of noble lineage who worked as court portraitist for the Spanish monarchy. Chapter III examines the self-portraits and innovative identity self-portraiture of Lavinia Fontana of Bologna. It is demonstrated how her two early self-portraits built on the precedent established by Sofonisba, and yet, are of somewhat greater iconographic complexity. While in her maturity the artist developed self-portraiture into the identity self-portrait through the subject of Judith and Holofernes. Within her treatments of the theme in some examples she put herself into the figure of Judith and in others into Judith’s maid Abra. Lavinia Fontana’s final masterpiece, the improbable painting Minerva Dressing done at the end of her extensive career was likewise arguably an identity self-portrait. Minerva Dressing constitutes the first female fully nude figure painted by a female artist. Chapter IV focuses on Artemisia Gentileschi. This thesis designates the artist’s Pommersfelden Susanna and the Elders as both Artemisia’s first exact self-portrait and the first female full-length nude self-portrait painted by a female artist. The work is also an identity self-portrait. This chapter continues with a discussion of both versions of Artemisia’s infamous Judith and Holofernes (Capodimonte/Uffizi). Both works are arguably exact self-portrait paintings and identity self-portraits. Artemisia’s Allegory of Painting in London, often referred to as a self-portrait in scholarship, is suggested a perhaps better understood as an ideal identity self-portrait rather than a literal self-representation. The Allegory of Painting is considered together with other attributed self-portraits and portraits of the artist. A major theme in Chapter IV is the transition from literal self-representation to allegorical and ideal portrayal of the self. This thesis suggests that, as the artist’s career advanced, Artemisia Gentileschi did continue to paint both the exact and the ideal self-portrait. Finally, in the Conclusion, the legacy of the self-portraits of the Wonder Women, to adopt a phrase from Giorgio Vasari, is considered in reference to future female artists such as Elisabetta Sirani, Angelica Kauffmann, Elisabeth Vigée Le-Brun and Paula Modersohn-Becker.

In part through critical biography, in part through a close reading of
almost all of the poems Rilke wrote, including many poems from
his Diaries, this large book challenges new ideas about what went
into the making of Rilke over twenty years of production, from his
early beginnings under the tutelage of Lou Salomé, right through, to
his famous final works, the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies.
Volume 1 focuses largely on The Book of Hours; Volume 2 on The Book
of Images, the two parts of New Poems, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids
Brigge, and the first Elegies written while at Duino; Volume 3 on those
all-crucial, self-transforming ten years beyond Duino that lead up to
the Sonnets to Orpheus and Rilke’s eventual completion of the Elegies.
Two major theses are put forward in this book, the first touching
on Rilke’s well-known relationship to his former lover and mentor,
Lou Salomé, who is understood to have been a far more problematic
influence on him than we had supposed, the second touching on an
equally crucial and at some point saving influence on Rilke from the
literary sphere, which is shown to be that of the great visionary poet
who went by the name of Novalis. Behind the grand story of Rilke’s
poetic emergence lies the fundamental and long-standing reality of his
repression by Lou and what that would sow, paradoxically, by way of
a sublimated achievement as sublimely poignant as it is finally tragic.

“My admiration for O’Meara’s close textual reading and analytical abilities in this Rilke text knows no bounds.”
{ Gary Geddes, editor of "20th-Century Poetry and Poetics", Oxford University Press, and author of "Active Trading: Selected Poems 1970-1995." }

Visit the author's website at
johnomeara.squarespace.com

From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, the concept of motherhood came to occupy a significant place in the German social consciousness. Entwined with theories of German nationalism and linked to population debates, the trope of the mother came to hold great political, social, and cultural significance by the time of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). This article examines how many artists as well as art critics, collectors, and dealers in 1920's Germany used the image of the mother as a tool to engage with contemporary social and political issues and to express their personal cultural visions. In specific I focus on the work of Paula Modersohn-Becker, Otto Dix, and Georg Schrimpf. By including a discussion of male artists this article attempts to expand the current discourse, dominated by the feminist art historian Marsha Meskimmon, which focuses almost exclusively on the trope of the mother as used by women artists. 
Published in Woman's Art Journal Fall/Winter 2009.

The French novelist Marie Darrieussecq published in 2016 a biography of the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, known for having been the first woman to portray herself naked. This article introduces this text in an interpretive struggle that has marked the reception of Modersohn-Becker’s work in feminist criticism from the 1970s to the present. Contrasting the vision that Darrieussecq offers of the German artist with that of art historians such as Linda Nochlin, Roszika Parker or Griselda Pollock, the reasons that the French author uses to present Modersohn-Becker as a pioneering artist in the developement of an artistic language that is articulated in feminine are identified and analyzed. In addition, a hypothesis that runs through the article is deployed: Darrieussecq constructs Paula Modersohn-Becker as a transdisciplinary referent, a precoursor who, beyond her scope of expression, the plastic, was able to expand the boundaries of female self-representation.

This essay interprets the basic biographical, metapoetic, and stylistic features of Rilke’s Diary, which the poet kept from September-December 1900 in Worpswede. Landscape comprehension and the artistic trials of its verbal representation, as well as the close communication with the painters of the artists’ colony at Worpswede are considered to be the formative grounds for Rilke’s diary notes. This diary describes a new stage in Rilke’s understanding of landscape and facial imagery as visual elements of the world. In translating this text I considered the authentic intonation and rhythm, together with the syntactic and stylistic originality of the author’s narration. The translation of Rilke’s Worpsweder Diary
fragment is the first time of its publication in Russian. It is a part of the work which has already been done on Rilke’s translation project, undertaken by the Russian publishing house ‘libra’.

Résumé
Pour éclairer l’ultime parole de Modersohn-Becker, Schade ("dommage"), ont été convoqués d’une part les concepts husserliens d’« intuition catégoriale » et de « vision », qui rendent compte de cette « totalité » non sensible que l’artiste saisit, dans une fulgurance de pensée. Et d’autre part, le terme linguistique de «  prédication précoce ». C’est grâce à la prédication précoce de la phrase impersonnelle que l’artiste peut attribuer « schade » sur cet « entier de temps » qu’elle n’a pas à nommer.

This essay was published in the catalogue 1912: Mission Moderne-Die Jahrhundertschau des Sonderbundes at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Foundation Corboud, which commemorated the centennial exhibition of modern art in Cologne, Germany that was the precursor to the New York Armory show. It makes the case that Paul Gauguin, whose work was widely exhibited in Germany even before the Sonderbund exhibition of 1912, was pivotal to the development of German Expressionism.