Being Here: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker - Marie Darrieussecq
The Book of the week is Marie Darrieussecq's Being Here: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker, translated by Penny Hueston and published by Text Publishing.
I have written this little biography because of this final word. Because it was a pity. Because I miss this woman I never knew. Because I would have liked her to live. I want to show her paintings, speak about her life. I want to do her more than justice: I want to bring her being-there, splendour. (Marie Darrieussecq, Being Here)
Born in Germany in 1876, Paula Modersohn-Becker was the first female artist to paint herself not only naked but pregnant. Being Here is a moving account of the life of this ground-breaking Expressionist painter, by the acclaimed French writer Marie Darrieussecq. As her art evolves, Paula is torn between Paris and her home in northern Germany. In Paris she can focus on her work, and mix with artists like Rodin and Monet, or her close friend the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. But Germany is home, and that’s where her painter husband Otto lives.
Being Here is the occasion to meet Paula, discover her style and choice of subjects—women, babies, domestic life. Darrieussecq tells the story of the artist's fraught marriage, her ambivalence about combining her passion for her career as an artist with motherhood.
She’s 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 … She doesn’t paint the Virgin and the baby, she paints the mother and the baby. And it’s not erotic, it’s not a man’s vision. It’s a woman’s vision of women who are not Madonnas and not prostitutes. It’s not Manet’s Olympia, and it’s not the Madonna of the Renaissance. At the Louvre, there is work by only four women but thousands and thousands of paintings of women. (Marie Darrieussecq in conversation with Kate Zambreno for the Paris Review).
If you'd like to hear more...
Marie Darrieussecq is coming to the Institut français on Wednesday 16th May for our Beyond Words Festival, during which she will be in conversation with Guardian editor Lisa Allardice at 7pm, and in the event "Publishing à la française" with P.O.L. editor Frédéric Boyer and Goncourt-winning author Atiq Rahimi a at 8pm!
Marie Darrieussecq is a French writer born in Bayonne in 1969. Her first novel, Pig Tales, was published in 1996 and subsequently translated into thirty-five languages. She has written some fifteen books for adults, including novels, short fiction, a play, and nonfiction works. In 2013 she was awarded both the Prix Médicis and the Prix des Prix for her novel Men. Being Here, her biography of Paula Modersohn-Becker, was released in 2016. She is a regular contributor to contemporary art magazines in France and Britain and also writes for Libération and Charlie Hebdo.
Penny Hueston is a Senior Editor at Text Publishing and a translator of numerous stories, articles and poems, including works by Marie Darrieussecq and 2014 Nobel Prize winner, Patrick Modiano. Her latest translation is the compelling novel Max by Sarah Cohen-Scali.
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