You Must Change Your Life by Rachel Corbett

misfit artists for a while. But by the time she turned twenty-one, she knew she was too ambitious to stay in the tiny colony forever.
    When Westhoff heard that the great sculptor Rodin had opened his own academy in Paris, she packed her bags at once. In the winter of 1899, she hiked up five flights of stairs to her tiny hotel room in Montparnasse. At that time most of the city’s artists still lived in Montmartre, a rustic, hilly territory only incorporated into modern Paris thirty years earlier. Bohemians had colonized it for its cheap rents and cheap thrills, like the cabaret Le Chat Noir, and Le Moulin Rouge, with its famous windmill façade that mimicked the actual windmills of Montmartre. But tourists soon began to crowd these theaters of “authentic” Parisiana and landlords cashed in. Suddenly they demanded their rents be paid on time—and not on credit, on canvas or in verse. The gentrification of Montmartre set in motion a great southward migration toward Montparnasse. The year before Westhoff arrived, the Dôme opened to join La Closerie des Lilas as the first of many cafés that would soon serve the throngs of loafing “Montparnos” on their way.
    Westhoff’s best friend from Germany, the painter Paula Becker, moved into the room next door a few months later. The night she arrived, they stayed up talking until dawn. They had become friends the previous year in Worpswede, when Becker noticed Westhoff’s tender handling of a bust. She thought it suggested that the sculptor was an equally gentle person and, before long, they were braiding lilies intoeach other’s hair by day and dancing waltzes after dinner. They were in many ways complementary opposites: Becker was a petite copper-blonde with huge brown eyes that consumed everything in sight. Westhoff was downcast and reserved. When Westhoff’s shyness overcame her in social settings, Becker’s enthusiasm bubbled over for two.

    Paula Becker and Clara Westhoff in Worpswede, circa 1899 .
    In Paris, they found new common ground as “women artists” in a city where no one cared about German art in the slightest. They explored the city together, scouting out shops that sold cheap barley coffee and the pastries they liked. They attended the salons and discovered the leading French artists, like Monet and Cézanne. The latter was such a revelation to Becker that Westhoff once watched her friend spin around in circles at a gallery showing the artist’s work. She had apparently discovered in his flatly painted canvases an affirmation of the work she had been making, and which she had not found among the Worpswede naturalists.
    Paris did not quite electrify Westhoff the same way it did her friend. While Becker was exhilarated by the city’s frenetic energy and cosmopolitanfashions, Westhoff’s only interest was working and making an impression on Rodin, a pursuit she found increasingly frustrating. A pleasant first exchange at his studio had set her hopes high. “He was very sweet to me, and showed me all kinds of things he was working on at the moment,” she told her parents. “Unfortunately I won’t be able to work alongside the men, for a thousand reasons which he explained to me.” But she still believed then that her work would transcend the superficial division, and “then I’ll ask him sometime to look at my work in my studio.”
    Westhoff found Rodin to be a rousing lecturer. His lessons were straightforward and he had a knack for simplifying complex ideas into pithy, digestible principles. “Smaller men try to make a mystery of their work and pretend there is nothing in it that can be taught, but there’s a very great deal that can be taught if there is someone who has the power to teach,” said his student Ottilie McLaren. But Westhoff wanted more than Rodin’s example. She wanted him to look at her work and critique it individually. Yet he came to