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

The short, obscure, and prolific life of the German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (18761907), a significant figure in modernism.

First published in France in 2016, Being Here Is So Much traces the short, obscure, and prolific life of the German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (18761907). 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.

Marie Darrieussecq's Being Here Is Everything is a voluptuous, melancholy portrait of an ambitious genius and her passionate and sometimes competing friendships with two other ambitious artists in her milieu. Drawing voraciously from letters, diaries, histories, and other literatures, Being Here Is Everything is all at once expressionist biography, obsessive detective work, and elegiac meditation into art and motherhood.

Marie Darrieussecq reads the testament of Modersohn-Beckerthe letters, the diaries, and above all the paintingswith a burning intelligence and a fierce hold on what it meant and means to be a woman and an artist.

Best Book on Art 2016

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

A magnetic portrait olƒ#