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  ALMOST AS SOON AS Parisians turned their calendars from 1899 to 1900, the hopelessness and anxiety that had defined the city at the fin de siècle gave way to a new millennial optimism. Where once people feared machine-powered industry, the possibilities of technology now excited them. Manufacturing elicited new consumerist desires, while intriguing advances in neurology and psychology quelled the fear of hysteria.

  Paris hosted the fourth edition of the International Congress of Psychology that year at the World’s Fair. The research presented there revealed a broader cultural embrace of the unknown. Furious debates broke out over papers on the topics of hypnosis, ESP and parapsychology. A few months earlier, Freud had published his Interpretation of Dreams, wherein he declared dreams the “royal road” to the unconscious. Some researchers considered these mysteries to be fascinating areas of inquiry; others thought they were an embarassment to the profession.

  The Eiffel Tower lit up during the Exposition Universelle of 1900.

  The World’s Fair was a mass-market utopia, “a phantasmagoria that people enter in order to be amused,” as Walter Benjamin later wrote. When the carriages rolled in on opening day, the ladies in cantilevered hats and men with walking sticks expected to be astonished by the latest innovation in motion pictures, motorcars, colonial exotica, art and electricity. French engineers unveiled the Métro subway and its Art Nouveau stations, connecting what had been a patchwork of hamlets into an integrated city. On either side of the Seine rose a replica town modeled after Arabian souks, alpine chalets and other exotic architecture. A new flâneur-friendly bridge, the arched steel Pont Alexandre III, connected the Champs-Élysées to the Eiffel Tower, which was eleven years old but gleaming like new in a fresh coat of gold paint. The centerpiece of the fair was the Palais d’Electricité, a sixty-foot-tall zinc building topped with a fairy riding in a chariot. Inside, water fountains and mirrors reflected the dazzling spectacle of the electric lightbulb.

  The new glass-domed Grand Palais and the trapezium-shaped Petit Palais were built to showcase the top French art. One showed work from the last century, including paintings by Delacroix, Courbet and Renoir. The other focused on art from the past decade (although it somehow managed to exclude Impressionism entirely). Three works by Claudel went on view, including her Profound Thought, which many saw as a feminist rebuke of Rodin’s The Thinker. It showed a woman in a thin dress kneeling inches from a lit fireplace, her hands clinging to the mantel. Claudel’s Thinker was the picture of vulnerability, without a shred of the manly muscularity of Rodin’s. Dangerous, ambivalent, damning, this was what intellectual life might have looked like to a woman at that time.

  Rodin showed a bust and The Kiss in the exhibition, but that was an inconsequential display compared to his personal, four-hundred-square-meter show down the street. He installed 165 sculptures in the pavilion, including Balzac, The Walking Man, a plaster version of The Gates of Hell and numerous bodily fragments.

  It was by far his largest exhibition to date, yet it did not immediately bring the attention he had hoped for. Rain dampened the opening festivities in June, while the light shows and dancers diverted the public’s eye from the non-spectacle showings. When Rodin complained to Jean Lorrain of the sparse foot traffic outside his pavilion, the poet agreed, “There’s not even a cat on avenue Montaigne.”

  But more serious-minded visitors knew Rodin’s historic undertaking was not to be missed. One of Rodin’s assistants noticed that at least those who did come on that first day seemed more interested in looking at the art than at each other. Word soon spread about Rodin’s strangely sexual, fractured forms and, within a few weeks, the artist found himself greeting Oscar Wilde, members of the royal von Hindenburg family and the modern dancer Isadora Duncan. When the young artist Edward Steichen came by and caught a glimpse of Rodin standing beside his Balzac he vowed to photograph him someday.

  Duncan was so taken by Rodin’s work that she found herself defending sculptures to passersby who were grumbling ignorances like, “Where is his head?” or “Where is her arm?” Duncan would correct them, “Don’t you know that this is not the thing itself, but a symbol—a conception of the ideal of life.”

  The reviews soon delivered more good news for Rodin. The essayist Rudolf Kassner declared him “the most modern among living artists. From the standpoint of history, he is the only one who is necessary. It is not empty phrase when I claim that the development that starts with the Greeks and reaches its midpoint with Michelangelo would not be complete were it not for Rodin.” He was “literally epoch-making.”

  Westhoff and Becker were no less moved by the show. “I was there yesterday, and today again, and these days have simply created an epoch in my life in Paris,” Becker wrote to a friend back in Worpswede, urging them to pay a visit. Rodin, especially, “has captured life and the spirit of life with enormous power. For me, he is comparable only to Michelangelo, and in some ways I even feel closer to him. That such human beings exist on earth makes living and striving worthwhile.” The show galvanized the women in time for their return to Worpswede that summer, their minds already fermenting with ideas.

  CHAPTER

  5

  WHILE TRAVELERS ACROSS THE GLOBE STREAMED INTO Paris to witness the first World’s Fair of the new millennium, some artists rebelled against the spectacle of modernity by withdrawing from society altogether. In Germany, one such group fled the country’s urban centers for Worpswede, a village of thatched-roof cottages tucked into a flat bed of farmland.

  In the mid-1880s, the Düsseldorf Art Academy student Fritz Mackensen started making summer pilgrimages to Worpswede to paint its sun-saturated landscapes. The silvery birch trees contrasted with the black, peat-gorged lakes. Ripe apples fell from the trees. It was just the spiritual rejuvenation he needed after enduring the aggressive pace of city life and the drain of art school’s tedious academicism (which was the standard insult slung at the moralistic realism favored in those days). Mackensen soon lured his friends there from Düsseldorf, Heinrich Vogeler and Otto Modersohn, with the promise that this village of peasants and peat harvesters would do the same for them.

  By 1889, they had all decided not to return to Düsseldorf and the artist colony was born. Newcomers joined with the hope that if they breathed the air of this fertile landscape, its creativity would germinate within them, too. To Worpsweders, nature was the only teacher and artists could learn as much by staring up at the clouds as they could with a paintbrush in hand. Within a decade, a younger generation started to arrive, including Clara Westhoff and Paula Becker, and, in August 1900, Vogeler invited a young poet he had met at a party in Florence, Rainer Maria Rilke. They had agreed that Vogeler would draw a selection of romantic, fairy-tale-style illustrations to accompany some of his poems. Now Vogeler invited Rilke to join him so they could collaborate in person.

  “How large the eyes become here! They want at all times to possess only sky,” Rilke wrote upon his arrival to Worpswede. While most of the colony’s residents lived in old farmhouses, Vogeler converted his home into a Jugendstil monument. He built an arched bannister leading up a flight of steps to the house’s pristine white walls, covered in vines. Vogeler, who had matte-brown eyes and a delicate, boyish face, greeted Rilke warmly and offered him his “blue gable room,” reserved for guests of honor.

  When he went on to explore the communal rooms, Rilke found young people lounged in oversized chairs. Wildflowers filled the vases. Someone played Schubert on the piano. The girls draped themselves in rose garlands, while the men wore the stiff, upturned collars in popular vintage fashion.

  It was exactly the relaxed setting Rilke needed after a year of rejections, from Andreas-Salomé, Tolstoy and, most recently, Anton Chekhov. Rilke had sent the playwright multiple letters asking him to read his recent translation of The Seagull, but Chekhov never responded. Rilke had also written desperate letters to the dance impresario Sergei Diaghilev, then an editor at the Russian magazine World of Art, pleading for his support
on an art exhibition Rilke had been trying to organize in Berlin. Diaghilev refused, and the show never happened.

  But in Worpswede Rilke found the comfort of a warm, tight-knit colony that believed in the fusion of love, friendship, and art. “I place great trust in this landscape, and will gladly accept from it path and possibilities for many days,” he wrote. “Here I can once again simply go along, become, be someone who changes.” The Worpsweders, however, were less sure of what to make of the poet. While the men dressed in velvet vests and long English overcoats, Rilke arrived in a pair of sandals and a breezy peasant’s blouse. He was striving for a fashionable bohemian look but ended up coming across more like a Slavic servant or a Czech nationalist, and even the housekeepers laughed behind his back.

  His poetry did not immediately impress his colleagues, either. On one of his first nights there, he joined the group in the candlelit music room for their weekly salon. When it was Rilke’s turn to share his work, he raised his calm, baritone voice over the crowd and recited his verses. As he heard himself speaking the lines his confidence in the poem grew. He noticed two women in white dresses watching him intently from a pair of velvet armchairs. It was Becker and Westhoff, just back from Paris.

  When Rilke finished, an older professor in the audience, Carl Hauptmann, spoke up. He suggested that perhaps the poem would be better if Rilke cut the last line. The poet stiffened at this barbaric idea. It was all the more insulting coming from a man who’d just read his own “contrived, abstract,” and “labored” prose from a huge pigskin journal, as Rilke complained in his diary later. Worst of all, the man had humiliated him in front of the women, who Rilke insisted loved the poem all the same.

  Becker, in her own diary, did not entirely agree with Rilke’s conclusions. She thought Hauptmann had presented “a difficult and stolid text,” but one that was “great and profound.” Her impression of Rilke was dominated more by his physical meekness than his words: his “small, touching hands” and “sweet and pale” face. He had clear talent, but she couldn’t compare his sentimental poems to Hauptmann’s because they were so different. Theirs was a “battle of realism with idealism,” she said, and it would drag on well after the candles burned out that night.

  Rilke spotted the women in white again on another Sunday. He had been gazing out his window when they emerged from the heathland like two lilies. That day the lively Becker arrived at the salon first, beaming beneath a wide-brimmed hat. Then came Westhoff, a towering goddess in a high-waisted Empire dress that fell in long folds to her bare, blistered feet. Rilke noticed how her dark curls breezed alongside her “beautiful dark face” as she entered the room. She was the star that night; the whole house seemed to light up once she arrived. “Every time I looked at her this evening she was beautiful in a different way,” Rilke wrote. “Especially in her listening.”

  But soon enough Hauptmann managed to spoil the mood once again with his theorizing. He dominated the discussion that night and then, when it was over, launched into a drinking song. Rilke knew that whenever nights ended with wine he would end up alone. He did not care for alcohol, and he did not dance, either. Sure enough, the next time Rilke cast a glance in Hauptmann’s direction he was dancing with Westhoff. Rilke tried at first to participate in the festivities. “I shake hands with some, with others not, I smile and don’t smile, rouse myself and stiffen, sit in a corner, smell the beer and breathe the smoke.” The whole scene was “sickening,” he thought, a highly German display of vulgarity: men leaning over their mugs, tobacco smoke stifling the air, the desperation of their drunken laughter. At last he stood up to go to bed.

  He didn’t make it far before he noticed, to his pleasant surprise, that the women in white were following him. Fresh off the dance floor, their cheeks were pink with laughter and they radiated heat. Rilke pushed open his window for them and they sat to cool themselves at the sill. As their breathing slowed, they turned their attention to the moonlight. Rilke watched them, no longer “disfigured” by their revelry, start to gaze deeply into the night. He saw in this moment a portrait of transition, framed by the window. It was as if Becker and Westhoff had transformed from girls into observant artists in a single second. After they left, the vision of the girls moved him to write a few lines of verse in his diary, where he described them “half held in thrall, yet already seizing hold . . .”

  Rilke came to the conclusion that the life of an artist should ideally begin at the precise moment when childhood ends. When one is open to the world with the unexpectant awe of a child, images come freely streaming in, like the moonlight to Becker and Westhoff’s eager eyes that night. But the poet now had to learn how to channel these images into art, and Worpswede seemed like the best place to do it. “The Russian journey with its daily losses remains for me such painful evidence that my eyes haven’t ripened yet: they don’t understand how to take in, how to hold, nor how to let go; burdened . . . And if I can learn from people, then surely it is from these people, who are so much like landscape themselves.”

  Rilke first sought out Otto Modersohn, a tall, red-bearded painter who was, at thirty-five, older and more established than many of the other artists at the colony. Rilke found his studio lined with moody landscape paintings and display cases filled with dead birds and plants, which he used to study color and the way it faded. Rilke told him about his desire to experience the world through the point of view of a visual artist, and Modersohn agreed that young people ought to approach life as receptively as bowls. They should not expect to be filled with answers, but, if they were lucky, with images, he said.

  From Modersohn’s studio, Rilke went on to visit Paula Becker. Discovering how easily they “made toward each other through conversations and silences,” he found himself becoming more attracted to the “blond painter” than the “dark” sculptress. But Clara Westhoff’s art continued to interest Rilke more than Becker’s (as did sculpture in general over painting, which he once derided as “a delusion”). Westhoff was drawn from the start to the poet’s boyish blue eyes, which distracted her from some of his less appealing features. Meanwhile, a quiet courtship was developing between Otto Modersohn and Becker. He was already married, but when his wife died suddenly that year, the pair got engaged. After that, Rilke turned all of his attention to Westhoff.

  His attraction was rooted primarily in respect for her work. Her reserved nature made it more difficult for a romance to develop. But their intimacy grew gradually over the coming weeks as she began to teach him about sculpture and told him stories about studying with Rodin. Afterward he would return to his room and recount these conversations in the pages of his journal. Once he suggested they cowrite an essay on Rodin. Over time, their rapport turned more tender, and his prose turned into poetry. He began writing verses about her strong hands, a feature that Rilke had always admired in artists, for he believed a sculptor’s hands could remake the world.

  AFTER SIX WEEKS, Rilke left Worpswede for Berlin. He had never intended to join the colony permanently and didn’t want to overstay his welcome as a guest.

  In his absence, Rilke and Westhoff stayed in touch through letters. He was so impressed by the descriptive imagery in her writing that sometimes he felt his responses were merely rephrasings of her experiences. In one remarkable passage he confessed his desire to load “my speeches with your possessions and to send my sentences to you, like heavy, swaying caravans, to fill all the rooms of your soul.”

  In February, Westhoff visited Rilke in Berlin. He did not idolize her the way he had Andreas-Salomé, but perhaps that was part of the appeal. He hinted once in his diary that the relationship with Andreas-Salomé had emasculated him. “I wanted to be the wealthy one, the giver, the one offering invitations, the master.” Yet he felt time and again that he was only “the most insignificant beggar” to her. He had nothing to offer his brilliant older lover, but this “maiden” Westhoff never seemed to doubt him. Her admiration felt refreshingly pure and uncomplicated.

  Rilke and Westho
ff surprised everyone with their engagement announcement the following month. When they returned to Worpswede to share the news with their friends, Otto Modersohn wrote to Paula Becker asking if she could guess who he saw that day: “Clara W. with her little Rilke under her arm.” By then Becker was away at a cooking school in Berlin, having submitted to pressure from her father to devote herself completely to her fiancé. He told her in a rather depressing birthday letter that she ought to “have his welfare constantly in sight” and not let herself “be guided by selfish thoughts . . .”

  By March, Becker was miserable. “Cooking, cooking, cooking. I cannot do that anymore, and I will not do that anymore, and I am not going to do that anymore,” she wrote to Modersohn, warning him, “You know, I can’t stand not painting much longer.” Becker promised herself that she would wait to have children until she had fulfilled her own dreams. But she feared that Westhoff was not so strong-willed. Becker predicted from the start that her friend’s new union would prove to be Westhoff’s sacrifice alone. Becker had felt Westhoff slipping away ever since she met Rilke. Why couldn’t they all live together again as a community, like they’d always dreamed? Becker wondered. “I no longer seem to belong to her life,” she wrote. “I have to first get used to that. I really long to have her still be a part of my life, for it was beautiful with her.”