At the beginning of the 20th century, bourgeois marriage was considered the ideal. Paula Modersohn-Becker and Charlotte Berend-Corinth are rare examples of how women artists nevertheless managed to maintain their independence.
At the beginning of the 20th century, most female artists were bound by the credo of marriage. There were indeed female artists who also lived alone and thus outside the norm, but they mostly did so without social recognition. After all, the construct of being an artist, which was seen as the antithesis of the bourgeois ideal, did not include married female artists. Thus, gender also defined the role relationship within married artist couples.
The woman traditionally took on the “passive”, domestic role, not least so that she did not pose any competition for her husband. Nevertheless, it is clear that male artists preferred to be with women who were also artistic so that they might feel “understood” in their creative genius. All the more interesting, then, is a look at the two following artist couples: Paula Modersohn-Becker and Otto Modersohn, and Charlotte Berend-Corinth and Lovis Corinth. Both these women managed in different ways to continue to be creatively active and to maintain their independence within the construct of marriage.
The female artists retained their independence
Since her youth, Charlotte Berend-Corinth had pursued her goal of becoming a respected artist. As a student of Lovis Corinth, she aspired neither to marry nor to have children – creative work was her overriding objective. Yet the two became close at his painting school and eventually married in 1903. The fact that Charlotte Berend and Lovis Corinth met in a teacher-pupil relationship no doubt led to an imbalance of power, meaning the pair did not work together. Rather, she posed as a model around 90 times for her successful husband’s oil paintings and supported him in his work and with preparations for exhibitions.
It was therefore not easy for Berend-Corinth to continue working as an artist alongside Corinth. Lovis Corinth, who was considered quite ruthless, showed little interest in Berend-Corinth’s artistic activities and often commanded her not to use the same paint colors or to paint the same subjects. Undeterred, Berend-Corinth painted portraits of dazzling figures from the Berlin theater world, such as the operetta star Fritzi Massary and her partner Max Pallenberg. The work “Die schwere Stunde” (“The Hard Hour”), which she produced in 1908, is also one of her major successes: It depicts a woman giving birth and caused a true furor among the general public.
When Lovis Corinth was appointed Chairman of the Berlin Secession in 1911, his wife was made one of the few female members and was later even made a jury member. In 1917, she exhibited her drawings and lithographs in the “Black and White Exhibition” at the Berlin Secession and was even able to sell a number of works, while Corinth sold none.
Charlotte Berend-Corinth, Die schwere Stunde, 1908 © FN, Image via www.fnweb.de
After Lovis Corinth’s death, Charlotte Berend-Corinth worked hard to take care of his estate. She also opened painting schools, first in Berlin and later in the USA. Berend-Corinth died in 1967 – that same year her works were exhibited for the first time in a major exhibition at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie.
The artistic work has always had priority
Like Charlotte Berend, the very ambitious and confident Paula Becker also aspired to be a successful artist. She met Otto Modersohn, an established landscape painter 11 years her senior, at the Worpswede artists’ colony. Before they married in 1901, the pair had been good friends, and even once they had married Paula Modersohn-Becker had no intention of giving up her artistic goals for domestic work. Quite the contrary: She continued to pursue her goals with the utmost ambition. For Modersohn-Becker, giving up her artistic work in favor of Otto Modersohn’s career was completely out of the question.
In fact, Modersohn supported her by taking on a domestic help so that Paula Modersohn-Becker could continue working every day in line with the tight daily schedule she set herself in her Worpswede studio. In the beginning, the artist and Otto Modersohn often even painted the same subjects together outside in the landscape. Despite some conflicts in the relationship and criticism of her unusual depictions of people, Otto Modersohn held Paula Modersohn-Becker’s work in high esteem and even supported her financially while she spent time alone in Paris.
Her surroundings perceived her as an artist’s wife
From today’s perspective it seems contradictory, but it was precisely this financial security that enabled Paula Modersohn-Becker to emancipate herself artistically and produce her avant-garde pictorial inventions, which bear witness to the influences of Paris and Worpswede as two different places. Nevertheless, she had little hope of making sales or holding exhibitions – partly due to her themes and her style, which was not meant to please. Those around her perceived her first and foremost as an artist’s wife.
Paula Modersohn-Becker and Otto Modersohn sitting on bench in garden, around 1904, Paula-Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung, Bremen
After Paula Modersohn-Becker’s untimely death in 1907, Otto Modersohn worked tirelessly to ensure her works were appreciated by the general public. In 1927, Bremen-based entrepreneur Ludwig Roselius opened a museum dedicated to Paula Modersohn-Becker – the first to be devoted to a female artist.
Modersohn welcomed her emancipatory will
These two artist relationships show how much the female artists of the period depended on their husbands’ goodwill. Female artists living in a marriage and yet on an equal footing to their husbands were a very rare phenomenon. Although Charlotte Berend-Corinth’s work was little appreciated by her husband, she did find her own strategies to chalk up successes and always considered herself unequivocally an artist. At the same time, though, she was consistently aware that her husband’s success could only come about if she scaled back on her own aspirations for a career as an artist. For Paula Modersohn-Becker, her freedom, in spite of marriage, was her condition for becoming a wife and Otto Modersohn welcomed this emancipatory spirit.
