Paula Modersohn-Becker

Paula Modersohn-Becker was one of the pioneers of Modernism in Germany. She lived with her husband, artist Otto Modersohn, in an artist’s colony in Worpswede near Bremen, with prolonged periods alone in Paris. 

Despite selling only a few paintings during her lifetime, Modersohn-Becker’s unconventional approach, upending traditional standards of femininity in the art world, made her one of the leading artists of her generation. And after her early death, she became known as one of Germany’s best known female painters - for instance, being the only woman who showed work at the Cologne Sonderbund in 1912 alongside Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso. 

Raised in Bremen, Paula Becker came from a cultured family that frequented artistic circles. She began painting in 1893, at the age of 16, and studied art in London and Berlin. In 1898, she moved to Worpswede, where a colony of artists had formed in 1889, seeking to escape encroaching industrialisation. There, she befriended Otto Modersohn, who would become her husband, and Clara Westhoff, the future wife of poet Rainer Maria Rilke. The surrounding landscape, still lifes, and domestic scenes were the main inspiration for the colony’s artists, but Modersohn-Becker distinguished herself by creating portraits of women and also self-portraits, in countless variations. The artist painted her figures close up, eliminating spatial depth as far as possible, depicting them in large simple shapes so that they often appear monumental. By 1906, she had begun painting life-sized nudes, influenced by the luminous palette and expressive brushwork of the leading members of the French avant-garde, including Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. In that last year of her life, her insights gained during longer stays in Paris, led to an oeuvre that was filled with colour-saturated, contour-emphasizing paintings with strong simplification of form. 

After her death, interest for the work of Modersohn-Becker increased, with exhibitions at the Museum Folkwang in Hagen and Wuppertal and the Berlin galleries Cassirer and Alfred Flechtheim. Also, art dealers were successful in offering the work to collectors and patrons. This appreciation culminated in 1927 in the first museum dedicated to a female painter, located on Böttcherstrasse in Bremen, where the Roselius collection amassed by the sculptor and architect Bernhard Hoetger was given a permanent home. Nowadays, Modersohn-Becker’s work is to be found in most important collections worldwide.