GOLDEN YEARS

Abstract

There is no instantly noticeable change in the style of the art of selfportraiture at the turn of the century, and the enthusiasm with which artists continue to embrace the genre persisted. Perhaps the adage Ars longa vita brevis is the reason, for it is this ability to make a mark reflecting one’s identity/identities that is not only innate but assures an immediate record and document of who you are. To make public what is personal and adapting and developing styles of painting whilst retaining individuality, indeed one’s own history. Traditionally artists’ self-portraits show the painter at work at the easel with brushes, palette, with perhaps a mirror and studio contents. The self-portrait is a sophisticated method of reflecting a moment in time, and the early twentieth century was a particularly momentous time for humanity in a world striving to be ‘modern’. Nikos Stangos in his introduction to Concepts of Modern Art states: “The roots of modernism lie in about the middle of the nineteenth century, in Baudelaires’s art criticism, in Gustave Courbet and Realism, in depictions of modernity [...] and in inventing the notion of the avant-garde.”2 One thing that failed to be politically modern was almost universally the treatment of women, their voting rights, their lack of selfrepresentation. Paula Modersohn-Becker – not an explicitly political feminist, rather a loner nevertheless exhibited an indomitable spirit and her passion for making art led her to the artists’ colony at Worspwede, near Bremen. Here she married, partly to escape the financial support of her parents but also for love. There she met artists including Rainer Maria Rilke and his wife Clara RilkeWesthoff. Modersohn-Becker left this enclave four times to visit Paris, writing, “I must learn to express the gentle vibration of things: the intrinsically rough texture [...] I must also find this expression in