Posts filed under 'artists'

The Human Life and the Greatest Work: On the Letters of Paula Modersohn-Becker and Rainer Maria Rilke

July 24, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Iona Tait

It is for this very reason—the painter’s desire to reconcile life and art—that Rilke’s memorialization of Modersohn-Becker is an act of distortion.

The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence, ed. Rainer Stamm, translated from the German by Ulrich Baer, Columbia University Press, 2024

“And so you died like women long ago, died in the old warm house, old-fashionedly, the death of those in child-bed,” wrote Rainer Maria Rilke in the moving “Requiem for a Friend”. The piece, dedicated to the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker a year after her death in 1907 at the age of thirty-one, has since immortalized her in the stead of her own achievements as one of the most important figures of early expressionism, turning her—through Rilke’s vision—into a literary muse, with views that Modersohn-Becker herself rejected. The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence, edited by Rainer Stamm and translated into English by Ulrich Baer, allows room for this poem in its final pages, but it also gives an equal voice to the two artists whose asymmetry in cultural history is tangible, and traces a friendship that was characterized by both companionship and disagreement, intimacy and coldness.

After their meeting in 1898 at an artists’ colony at Worpswede, the artists began their correspondence two years later. That German village would go on to figure centrally in the friends’ relationship, with Modersohn-Becker telling Rilke in 1900 that he is “the only piece of Worpswede for me in Berlin, and that means a lot”. It was there that the two artists gained respect for the other’s medium, an important facet of their relationship that is present in the Correspondence. Rilke recommends contemporary authors and sends poems in his letters; they discuss Paul Cézanne at length; and Rilke thinks of Paula when he is in Capri, as “[s]uch peculiar, unheard-of experiences of colour are possible here”, “things here that have never been properly seen and turned into art”. It was also at Worpswede that the two artists would meet their respective partners: Modersohn-Becker met fellow artist Otto Modersohn, getting engaged in secret at the colony, whilst in 1901 Rilke would marry Modersohn-Becker’s close friend, Clara Westhoff. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An excerpt from “Flies in Winter” by Eugenio Baroncelli

December 6, 2016  |  in Translations  |  by Chenxin Jiang

Some said he suffocated on a mischievous piece of meat… some said he died of solitude, which is no less mischievous.

Eugenio Baroncelli’s macabre, erudite vignettes of 271 historical and literary deaths won the 2011 Premio Supermondello, one of Italy’s highest literary awards. He catalogues accidental and premeditated deaths, illness, hypothermia, suicide. Each of his sly, epigrammatic sketches of dying is an object lesson in living.

Umberto Boccioni

Sorte, Verona, 17 August 1916. Never end up in a place called Sorte, or Luck. War had thrust him there, only for him to die in a stroke of misfortune. He had enlisted voluntarily, dressed hurriedly in uniform, and now he was dying, aged thirty-four. He had fallen from the horse he was learning to mount, struck his head full of colours, and would never get up again. That was how Maria Malibran died, and she was barely more skillful than he was; Genghis Khan, too, and he was born on a horse. He died with a dream: not of vanquishing his enemy on the battlefield, but of riding with her under the moon that bleached the lake white.

The gods looked down at him from the sky. He had the distinctive hand of a future great artist and the agile body of a seducer. A vexed Margherita Sarfatti, who had been in bed with him, would deplore the sharp escalation of his targets, from seamstresses to the wives of bank managers.

Three weeks beforehand, on the bank of Lake Maggiore, he had met Vittoria Colonna and fallen in love for the last time. Beautiful, married, impulsive, and greedy for life, she fell in love instantly too. They went swimming in a lake filled with water the hue of cobalt blue, the same colour his palette was wandering towards when he painted the master Busoni. Lazy as cats, they sunbathed on the terrace of the villa, that little strip of earth that she had transformed into a Garden of Eden. They dined alone by candlelight. Her last letter was found on him. He had taken it with him from their paradise.

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