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1876 - 1907 • German • Painter/Graphic Artist • Expressionist
"Don't be sad about me. If my life won't take me back to Worpswede, that does not mean that the eight years that T spent there were not good. I found Otto very touching. This, and thoughts of you, make my path a difficult one." - Paula Modersohn-Becker
Modersohn-Becker, a major influence on MODERN art in Germany, was the first German painter to use POSTIMPRESSIONIST ideas in her paintings. She studied at the Berlin School for Women Artists and at the German artists' colony of Worpswede, where she met her teacher and future husband, Otto Modersohn. She left Worpswede to study in Paris in 1900, the first of four trips to that city. After her marriage in 1901, back in Germany, she was torn between her domestic responsibilities and her drive to express herself through art-a compulsion fed by EXPRESSIONIST manifestos. She fled to Paris. Her family implored her to return, and the passage quoted above is from a letter to her mother. In Paris she studied literature as well as art, and was a friend of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whom she had met at Worpswede and who had been RODIN's secretary in Paris. Her numerous self-portraits have unusual candor and depth, belied by a highly simplified use of color and line. Her style shows several current trends: The geometric, volumetric planes of the face in her 1906 Self-Portrait with Amber Necklace, for example, may recall both MATISSE's portraits of his wife and PICASSO's Gertrude Stein (1905). But more important is her nudity and that in Mother and Child Lying Nude (1907). Modersohn-Becker and VALADON were among the first women to concentrate on painting the female nude. This was a bold step, proclaiming independence from the tradition of representing the female body for the erotic pleasure of males, as FEMINIST historians and critics explain. Modersohn Becker's promising career ended when she died, soon after childbirth, at the age of 3 1. In her writings she had expressed premonitions of an early death. As short as her career was, she left behind some 400 paintings and studies and 1,000 drawings.
