Being Here Is Everything: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker

By Marie Darrieussecq
Translated by Penny Hueston

Lire magazine: Best Book on Art 2016

"A biography full of life force, drafted in the present with grace...Dazzling!"―Elle

"A magnetic portrait of a woman, taking shape through the seemingly simple, but always so beautiful, writing of Marie Darrieussecq."―Vogue

"Darrieussecq’s writing is poetic and stylized; the tableau unfolds sometimes in one-sentence paragraphs and one-word sentences, and always in the present tense. Clearly written for a broad audience, this book will renew appreciation for a deserving artist who’s too often reduced to a mere passing mention in art-history textbooks."―Publishers Weekly

The short, obscure, and prolific life of the German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907), a significant figure in modernism.

First published in France in 2016, Being Here Is Everything traces the short, obscure, and prolific life of the German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907). In a brief career, cut short by her death from an embolism at the age of thirty-one, shortly after she gave birth to a child, Modersohn-Becker trained in Germany, traveled often to Paris, developed close friendships with the sculptor Clara Westhoff and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and became one of her generation's preeminent artists, helping introduce modernity to the twentieth century alongside such other painters as Picasso and Matisse.

Marie Darrieussecq's triumphant and illuminating biography at once revives Modersohn-Becker's reputation as a significant figure in modernism and sheds light on the extreme difficulty women have faced in attaining recognition and establishing artistic careers.

Paperback
160 pages
Semiotext(e), 2017
5.4 x 0.4 x 8 inches
ISBN 9781635900088
Artist Monographs, Biography, Painter, Women Artists