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An art-lover’s fantasy dinner-party – during which history is overturned

e’ve witnessed a top-to-bottom overhaul of the story of modernism in recent decades, as art historians have switched attention from those canonical “heroes” who’ve always hogged the limelight to lesser-known, formerly excluded figures. Making Modernism at the Royal Academy of Arts is the latest example of this tendency, foregrounding work by four sophisticated female artists (Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter, and Marianne Werefkin), plus a handful of others, all of whom were active in Germany in the early 20th century.

Twins (1909, detail) by Marianne Werefkin - Fondazione Marianne Werefkin/Museo Comunale d'Arte Moderna, Ascona© Fondazione Marianne Werefkin/Museo Comunale d'Arte Moderna, Ascona

Three of the group were in long-term relationships with artists whose reputations have overshadowed theirs: Münter’s partner, for instance, was Wassily Kandinsky, who appears here, with flashing blue eyes, in a painting of a domestic interior, gesticulating during a debate with another featured artist, Erma Bossi. (“Mansplaining” away, no doubt.)

With almost 70 paintings and works on paper, this excellent essay in rediscovery is, essentially, a survey of Expressionism from a female perspective. Halfway through, for instance, in a red-walled section titled Intimacy, we find a painting of a breastfeeding baby. Yet, children, for these ambitious women, were burdens as much as bundles of joy.

Thankfully, the exhibition wears its agenda lightly – although the catalogue’s misguided introductory essay, repeatedly emphasising the artists’ “privilege” and arbitrarily evoking “colonial Germany”, is a different story. In a sense, the title is a misnomer, too, since the aims of some of the quartet don’t feel very “modernist” at all. Kollwitz, for instance, who dedicated herself to the graphic arts and often depicted the working-class patients of her doctor-husband, produced prints and drawings of remarkable force that wouldn’t have felt unfamiliar to Rembrandt: in one late self-portrait, she gives her ageing skin the appearance of timeworn wood.

Elsewhere, her tender pencil drawing of a young child’s head cradled by its mother’s hands has the sensitivity of a silverpoint study by some Renaissance master, as subtle graphite marks evoke gossamer-fine hair falling over adult fingers. Little connects Kollwitz with, say, the Dutch artist Jacoba van Heemskerck, represented at the RA by two glorious abstract paintings, all chromatic curves, swellings, and undulations, without a (masculine) right angle in sight. 

 

Mother with Child on her Arm, Nude II (1906) by Paula Modersohn-Becker - Jürgen Spiler© Provided by The Telegraph

Werefkin, a Russian aristocrat’s spirited daughter, who put her own career on hold to promote that of her partner, the artist Alexei Jawlensky (who thanked her by getting her housekeeper pregnant), is, for me, the weak link: her images have a sinuous, superficial quality, like classy illustrations for up-to-the-minute novels. At the Café (1909) depicts four melancholic poet-types in evening wear slumped around a table, contemplating two glasses of diabolically glowing absinthe. Already when it was painted, it surely felt like a suave pastiche of Munch, Symbolism and "blue period" Picasso.

Indeed, echoes of the (male) originators of Modernism are detectable at every turn – although Modersohn-Becker’s still-life of oranges and goldfish, which calls to mind Matisse, was created, extraordinarily, in 1906, before either had become a signature subject for the Frenchman.

Modersohn-Becker – who made bold, austerely beautiful images of great seriousness and solidity, with none of Werefkin’s modishness or flash – was an original, first-rate talent, who, astonishingly, despite feeling suffocated by the expectations of marriage and dying of a pulmonary embolism aged 31, produced more than 700 paintings; it’s ridiculous that, on these shores, she isn’t better known. Thanks to its high-keyed, Fauvist palette, Münter’s work demands attention, too.

If I have one substantial criticism, it’s that the Royal Academy has timidly grouped together such various talents as if staging a fantasy dinner-party. Wouldn’t it have been more courageous to give, say, Modersohn-Becker her own amply merited solo show? For all the self-congratulatory talk of equality within the art world, there’s still some way to go. 

Reference: The Telegraph:L Alastair Sooke -