Posts filed under 'expressionism'

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: “Shchepliak” by Zigmunt Leyb

February 5, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by Jordan Finkin

The long gray years are stifling his marrow, devouring him piecemeal, chilling his blood.

From Yiddish writer and political activist Zigmunt Leyb, this week’s Translation Tuesday centers on Shchepliak, an old man living a bleak and lonely life in Vienna. Written nearly a century ago, Leyb’s writing nonetheless feels modern in its spareness and simplicity.

Shchepliak lives in a little room that is long and narrow. Its high, empty walls are gray, the uppermost edges a mix of dark patches of shadow and broad swaths of cobwebs. Shchepliak roams about his room, measuring. He moves his rags from one spot to another, mends a hole, sews on a patch. And when he is beset by an attack of gray yawning, which makes his small eyes fill with salty tears, he sets down the bundles, rubs his eyes, and looks around the room. He then walks slowly over to one patch of empty wall and directs his eyes toward a yellowed stain. He raises his head, his eyes boring into the yellow stain as he thinks and thinks—until the loud chime of a clock somewhere frightens him, interrupting the dull muddle of his changeless thoughts.

Shchepliak perks up his ears, wrinkles his narrow brow, opens his mouth like a pitiful child, and listens to the chime of the clock.

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