Estar aquí es espléndido

"I am no longer Modersohn and I am no longer Paula Becker. I am Me, and I hope to be more and more Me", the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker wrote to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter in February 1906. On the threshold of the twentieth century, the artist bet everything to be "someone". And she became the boldest innovator, challenging centuries of representation of the female body and domestic life in art. Before her, no painter had portrayed herself nude, or pregnant, or depicted naked mothers with their babies, breastfeeding. As her art evolves, Paula is torn between Paris and her home in the artists' colony of Worpswede in northern Germany. In Paris she can focus on her work, go to exhibitions and meet artists like Rodin and Monet. But Germany is her home, where her husband, the painter Otto Modersohn, lives. Demanding, stubborn, and accurate when it came to her art, she was also cheerful, fun, and sensual; she was full of life, and therefore equally with doubts and inconsistencies, with fearless leaps forward or unexpected steps backward. She loved rice pudding, applesauce, walking in the heath, Cézanne, bathing in the sea, being naked in the sun, she preferred reading to earning a living and she adored Paris. She didn't quite like being married. She maybe she wanted to be a mother; On this point, her diaries and letters from her are ambiguous. Despite the fact that she died at age thirty-one, a few days after giving birth, her life was a celebration, a short and intense celebration.