Paula Modersohn-Becker
A pioneer of German modernism.
Paula Modersohn-Becker painted self-portraits and women and children in simplified forms. She died at the age of 31, shortly after the birth of her first child.
Paula Becker was born in 1876 in Dresden and grew up in Bremen. The family was cultivated and had international connections. She attended a teacher-training college so as to have a secure profession, but at the same time took painting lessons in London and at an art school for women in Berlin.
In 1898 she moved to the artists’ colony of Worpswede near Bremen, where painters sought out the simple life of the countryside. There she met the sculptor Clara Westhoff, who became a close friend, and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In 1901 she married the painter Otto Modersohn, a widower with a young daughter.
Paula soon felt constrained in Worpswede and travelled to Paris several times. There she studied Cézanne, Gauguin and van Gogh as well as the ancient mummy portraits from Egypt. Her own style became simple and monumental, with heavy forms, earthy colours and still, serious faces. She painted women, children, peasants and still lifes.
In 1906 she left her husband and moved to Paris to develop as an artist. The same year she painted Self-Portrait on her Sixth Wedding Anniversary, in which she depicts herself naked and apparently pregnant. It is usually regarded as the first known nude self-portrait by a woman artist. She was later reconciled with Otto and returned to Worpswede. In November 1907 her daughter Mathilde was born. A few weeks later Paula died of an embolism, aged 31.
In her lifetime she sold only a handful of works, but she left hundreds of paintings. In 1927 a museum devoted to her opened in Bremen, one of the first in the world dedicated to a woman artist. Today she is regarded as one of the most important forerunners of German Expressionism.