Subject: Re: Musee Rodin
From: Louise Z. Brooks (invertedforest@angelfire.com)
Date: Thu Feb 17 2000 - 18:22:45 EST
It is an absolutely stupefying coincidence that only yesterday I began reading a book given me by a relative that begins by telling the sad tale of Paula Modersohn-Becker - and almost straight away the magical name, Rilke, popped up.
For those who don't know the story, in a nutshell Paula was a very talented and audacious painter who married another artist but who found herself stifled by the marriage. She fled to Paris in 1906 where she experienced the happiest and most productive time of her life. Rilke fell in love with her and bought the only artwork she ever sold in her life. However, he always retained a slightly patronising view of her artwork.
In 1907 she was forced to return home, exhausted, poor, broken by the struggle - and pregnant. This final point is significant because one of her most striking self-portraits is from that magical year 1906 in which she is pregnant and bursting with self-satisfaction. In real life she was not pregnant at all but somehow the picture manages to convey the maternal instinct so perfectly. Modersohn-Becker's best pictures focus on the bond between mother and child.
In 1907 she went into labour, finally giving birth to a baby girl. She stood and reached out for her mother. She barely had time to utter the words `A pity,' before she died of an embolism.
It was only when Rilke saw a posthumous exhibition of Cezanne's work that he appreciated what Paula was attempting to achieve in her artwork, and how significant and important this attempt was. He was tortured by the fact that this realisation had come all too late, and wrote the requiem that Bruce mentions:
`For that is what you understood: ripe fruits
You set them before the canvas, in white bowls,
and weighed out each one's heaviness with your colours.
Women too, you saw, were fruits; and children, molded
from inside, into the shapes of their existence.
And at last, you saw yourself a fruit, you stepped
out of your clothes and brought your naked body
before the mirror, you let yourself inside
down to your gaze; which stayed in front, immense,
and didn't say: I am that; no: this is.
...
I will stand
for hours, talking with women in their doorways
and watching, while they call their children home.
It is a most beautiful contemplation of the importance of women's art by a man.
Close elipses. Or for those who know HTML, (/rilke) ;)
--- Louise Z. Brooks "Invention my dear friends is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation and 2% butterscotch ripple." - Willy WonkaOn Thu, 17 Feb 2000 09:37:27 citycabn wrote: >will, > >You surely must know the story of how Rilke brought Rodin to the Hotel >Biron, which, in time, became the Musee Rodin. And that RMR, while living in >the hotel, wrote some of his finest works: "Requiem" (for Paula Modersohn >Becker) and much of his novel, _The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge_. He >recently had finished his _New Poems: The Other Part_, in 1908, (the second >volume of the Ding-Gedichte that owed so much to Rodin's influence) and >dedicated it to Rodin. If you click on the below, it should take you to a >blow-up of an illustration in the Archives section of the Musee Rodin >website and you will see the actual book with RMR's original inscription to >Rodin, and one can make out that distinctive signature. > >http://www.musee-rodin.fr/images/imagra/Livresg.jpg > >all the best, >Bruce > >- >* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message >* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH >
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