Books

Drusilla Modjeska
A Woman’s Eye, Her Art

In one of the last images Drusilla Modjeska discusses in A Woman’s Eye, Her Art, Lee Miller poses in the bathtub in Hitler’s Munich apartment. It is 1945. Photographers Miller and David E. Scherman have, in recent days, been among the first to walk through Dachau after its liberation, speaking with inmates, stepping among bodies, photographing evidence of atrocities. Miller cabled her publisher, Vogue: I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE.

A white bath mat is darkened by the Dachau dirt. Miller poses with a portrait of Hitler behind her and a Nazi artist’s sculpture of a naked woman beside her as her Jewish lover photographs an artist “who stood for all [Hitler] condemned as degenerate”.

Miller photographs Scherman too, but Modjeska’s steady eye is on Miller washing off dirt, the psychic residue of which will prove indelible. From the bath she looks towards what Modjeska calls “that kitsch sculpture, that crude icon of femininity”, a distorting mirror reproducing only what is acceptable – breasts bared under a coquettish raised arm, legs footless alongside Miller’s filthy discarded boots.

In the apartment of Hitler’s wife, Eva Braun, Miller finds tweezers and lipsticks, accoutrements to craft the façade of idealised femininity Miller wrangled with, as a sexually abused child, a model, then a photographer. The line between subject and object, witness and voyeur that she interrogated as model and photographer was one she drew on as a war correspondent, shielding the dignity of the dead while utterly conscious of her responsibility to bear witness. Scherman called her “a peacetime casualty”, as after these experiences Miller’s son would know her only as a “useless drunk”.

Modjeska’s book witnesses the granular to disclose patterns. It opens not far from Munich, in 1899. Twenty-three-year-old Paula Becker calls to her mother from a Bremen bus, urging her to stop worrying about her. It will take, writes Modjeska, “storm and flame”, but Becker will pursue her art, surmounting the impediments each stage of her short life brings. She longs for love to “bloom” between herself and recently widowed painter Otto Modersohn. When it does, she finds herself in a “dry marriage”, expected to mother his small daughter, her ideas often dismissed. Yet she is compelled by “the loop of hope that [steps] her forward”.

Separating from Otto, she produces more than 700 paintings, many of them nudes. They include self-portraits, one that depicts her pregnant, the first known nude self-portrait by a woman. The couple reconciled and had a child, Mathilde. Modersohn-Becker died weeks later from a postpartum embolism. Yet, as Modersohn-Becker called to her mother, “There is no other way.”

More than a century later in a Sydney cafe, Modjeska and photographer Julie Rrap see an image of Modersohn-Becker on Google’s search page that commemorates her 142nd birthday. This accolade followed almost a century in which the artist’s work was scarcely known.

Along with Modersohn-Becker and Miller, Modjeska brilliantly depicts Dora Maar, surrealist Claude Cahun, and the artists around them. Modjeska’s eye is calibrated, as she says of Miller, to find “the revealing detail”. Throughout her career she has revealed the lives of women artists, from Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925-1945, which grew from her PhD, to work poised between fiction and nonfiction, including Poppy, a fictionalised biography of her mother, and The Orchard, which anticipates autofiction with an elided, fictionalised and interrogated “I” similar to that crafted by these artists. Stravinsky’s Lunch juxtaposes the lives of artists Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith.

Modjeska considers artists, nudes and muses in the context of Rrap’s portrayal of her own body. Rrap chose not to photograph another woman, conscious of the power imbalance. What happens when the nude sees, when self-portraits subvert what Modjeska calls “grammars of gender” so omnipresent “we breathe them in as if they were air”?

Glimpses of Rrap and Modjeska’s conversation are stitched through the book. Rrap emphasises the artists’ montages, important to her own work. “Look at Dora Maar’s montages … Look at Claude Cahun’s montages. It’s the construct that discloses.” Modjeska’s empathic method involves similar montage. Through meticulous placement of details from lives alongside one another, patterns and reverberations become evident.

Besides motifs of the muse picking up the brush or camera are motherhood, money, agency, lovers and time. Modjeska parses how we often know these women through men’s art – poet Rilke’s elegy for his friend Modersohn-Becker, Man Ray’s photos of Lee Miller, Dora Maar as the model for Picasso’s weeping women. And how these artists’ descendants tenderly bring their work into the light – Miller’s granddaughter, Mathilde Modersohn, as well as figurative offspring, younger artists and curators such as Modjeska. Better understanding emerges over time, too, as in the ways Cahun’s queerness manifests in art that skews heteronormative grammars.

Modjeska quotes artist Méret Oppenheim’s words: “if you speak a new language … you may have to wait a very long time for a positive echo”. Creativity necessarily reaches out of time and belated reception can result. The same marketing that fetishises conventional images of women accents the latest product and ignores what has come before, especially if it is insubordinate.

The idea of morphing from seen to seeing, muse to artist, object to subject, extends into an analogue for changes in women’s lives. To dispense privileges more evenly – education, suffrage, freedom – takes time. Modjeska is part of a lineage of artists whose radical work has been seen more clearly in hindsight. Hers is patient and visionary, disclosing artists’ lives of prescience and belated reception, compelled by that “loop of hope”.

Penguin, 512pp, $55 (hardback)

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 8, 2025 as "A Woman’s Eye, Her Art".

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