SELF-PORTRAIT WITH TWO FLOWERS IN HER RAISED LEFT HAND
PAULA MODERSOHN-BECKER, 1907
She's looking right at you. Not posing, just looking back. Like she's the one sizing you up. And in 1907, that's a radical thing to be doing. For five hundred years, women in paintings are there to get looked at. They're the model, never the one holding the brush. Paula Modersohn-Becker wasn't having it. A year or so before this, she'd painted herself nude. Just about the first woman anyone can name who'd tried it. So now she's both at once. The one holding the brush, and the one everybody's looking at. And she just... did it. Didn't ask. Here, she's covered up. Just her face, and two flowers held up in one hand, a red one and a pink one. But look at that face. Rough, thick, kind of built up in ridges, the cheeks too pink. It doesn't look like a normal portrait. It looks carved. Permanent. Like something dug up. And that's no accident. She'd been over at the Louvre, studying the Egyptian mummy portraits. The faces they laid over the dead, made to keep looking at the living long after the person's gone. That's the face she gives herself. One meant to outlast her. A few months later, she has a daughter. Eighteen days after the birth, she stands up for the first time, and a blood clot kills her. Thirty-one years old. More than seven hundred paintings, and she was barely getting started. They say she had time for one last word. Schade. What a pity. She had no idea any of that was coming. She just stood here and gave herself a face built to be remembered. Not a woman to be looked at. A woman doing the looking. Still holding up those two flowers. And here you are. The whoever comes next.