Drusilla Modjeska looks small in her favourite leather chair, sitting beneath a photographic self-portrait of her friend, the artist Julie Rrap. A recent gift from the artist, the poster-size image shows Rrap’s face and bare shoulders, topped by the back of her own head and shoulders worn as a surreal hat. Her eyes meet ours – confident, amused and slightly challenging.
Rrap, who reversed her patronymic name Parr as an act of feminist subversion, was one of Modjeska’s companions and guides to the early 20th-century female artists she brings to the fore in her new book, A Woman’s Eye, Her Art, a group biography that weaves art history with world wars and social change through contemporary eyes. It is a work of passion and scholarship about “seeing and being seen”, Modjeska says.
There’s an air of Virginia Woolf about Modjeska, who retains a soft English voice after living in Australia for more than 50 years. She quotes Woolf often, and also insists in her writing that women need a room, and a life, of their own.
Since Exiles at Home in 1981, Modjeska’s books have examined female writers and artists, her family and herself, in hybrids of biography, memoir and fiction, with an authoritative but intimate tone. Her 1999 book Stravinsky’s Lunch contrasted the lives of Australian artists Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington-Smith – “the bohemian and the spinster”. Stravinsky demanded his wife and children eat lunch with him in silence so his composition was not interrupted; Bowen and Cossington-Smith made their art around love and domestic duties.
Stravinsky’s Lunch opened with Paula Modersohn-Becker, a German expressionist who is also the keystone of Modjeska’s latest book. In 1899, she left her parents’ home in Bremen to become an artist, and ran again from her husband, Otto Modersohn, a traditional landscape painter who tried to steer his wife’s career. In Paris she found a studio and a lover, was an early enthusiast for Cézanne and Gauguin, and developed her distinctive portraits of women, and of herself. But unable to support herself in Paris and wanting a child, she returned to her husband. Days after her daughter’s birth in 1907, she died of a pulmonary embolism at 31, leaving behind hundreds of paintings and drawings.
From her chair, Modjeska reaches out to a self-portrait by Modersohn-Becker. After seeing the artist’s work in Bremen in 1999, she bought this miniature print of her 1905 Self-Portrait with Green Background and Blue Irises, which has sat on her desk ever since. “One of the things that fascinated me is the eyes,” she says. “Those eyes sear into you. She saw so much, she was so little seen – the pain of that. I’m no less fascinated with her now than I was then.”
Modersohn-Becker was one of many modernist women who saw the female form afresh and forged careers against crushing odds. Her talented friend, the sculptor Clara Westhoff, was stifled by her marriage to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who complained about “the complication of the woman being an artist”.
In 2018 Google featured Modersohn-Becker – by now internationally famous – on its search page to mark her 142nd birthday. It was the same week the then Australian deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce and his former media adviser Vikki Campion were in the news with paparazzi photographs emphasising her pregnant body. It reminded Modjeska of Modersohn-Becker’s intimate self-portrait showing her naked and pregnant – painted a year before she really was pregnant. Perhaps she was wondering if art and motherhood can coexist, Modjeska speculates.
At the same time, the National Gallery of Australia was planning its series of exhibitions to showcase women’s art, Know My Name – “A really good title but it shouldn’t be necessary,” Modjeska says. Nothing much had changed in the old “woman as subject, women as object” question that had inspired the 1985 Guerrilla Girls’ poster: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?”
With that “weird” conjunction of events, Modjeska began writing about Modersohn-Becker, a woman who “lived entirely with her eyes”. From there she looked at the next generation of women who found creative freedom in Paris, surrealism and photography: Claude Cahun, a queer artist who performed gender in masks and costumes; Dora Maar, whose work became hidden behind her distorted image as Picasso’s lover and muse; and Lee Miller, who leapt from posing for Vogue and Man Ray to wielding the camera herself as an artist and war correspondent.
Miller “was so beautiful, men fell over themselves,” Modjeska says. “Man Ray photographed her a squillion times, often naked. The male gaze.” Her own art photography rebelled by turning female bodies into abstract compositions or shocking symbols, such as a severed breast on a plate.
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“I thought the nudes she did, which are just the body, no breasts, no face, no head, were really interesting. Also, she was so successful – it was possible, in a way it wasn’t for Paula’s generation, to make a living from fashion and portrait photography. Her portraiture is really interesting, because it’s not that cold stony gaze, that masculine view; there’s much more affinity in it.” (And yet much of Miller’s less commercial, more difficult work sat unknown in her attic until after her death in 1977.)
A Woman’s Eye, Her Art contains a rich selection of the women’s artworks and hardly any by the famous men who were their husbands and lovers – Picasso, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Éluard, Roland Penrose. Modjeska doesn’t diminish their achievements, but she shifts the focus.
She shows tenderness, as well as domination and betrayal, in those complicated relationships. Under the heading Eros and Shadow, she lingers on the summer of 1937 when many artistic couples gathered on the Côte d’Azur. Everyone had cameras and recorded the candid sensuality of days on the beach, while war raged in Spain and loomed across Europe.
Modjeska sees echoes of those threatening times in ours: “I feel how easy it is that we can live in the sunshine and not see the shadow.”
Modjeska engaged the portrait artists Julie Rrap and Chantal Joffe to look at art with her; another artist friend, Helen Mueller, translated a new German edition of Modersohn-Becker’s letters and diaries, revealing that her husband’s impotence had been redacted from the first edition.
While writing, Modjeska was also giving interviews to Bernadette Brennan, who is working on a biography about her, with access to her archive of diaries and letters. Seeing and being seen, indeed.
“At a personal level it can be a bit confronting,” Modjeska says of being written about. “But at an intellectual level, it’s interesting to see the process Bernadette goes through and what my life says about bigger things in generational terms. It’s me and it’s also not me.”