Paula Modersohn-Becker

Paula Modersohn-Becker's life and work moved between two poles: the artists' village Worpswede near Bremen and Paris. At the turn of the century, the French metropolis was a melting pot for a wide variety of artistic trends, from where the groundbreaking movements of modernism began. After months of secluded work in Worpswede Paula Modersohn-Becker was looking for the vibrant life and inspiring art experiences of Paris. Among the German artists, she was one of the first to discover the paintings of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and the Nabis group of artists. With a sure sense for the groundbreaking innovations of these painters, she developed her own work continuously. When she died of an embolism on November 20, 1907, at the age of just 31, she was one of the pioneers of modernism in Germany.

During her first stay in Paris in 1900 Paula Modersohn-Becker devoted herself to her Paris environment, which she painted from the private vantage point of her lodgings in the Parisian quarter of Montparnasse. The bold construction and rough reduction of the picture elements displayed in these works already indicate the geometrically planned landscapes that Paula Modersohn-Becker was to create in Worpswede after her first stay in Paris. These stand in drastic contrast to the emphatically emotional landscape paintings of the Worpswede artists and attest to the painter’s being deeply influenced by Paul Cézanne, whose art she had already encountered in Paris in 1900. Like Georges Braque and André Derain after her, she adopted Cézanne’s basic concept of emancipation from natural reproduction, translating an impression of nature into a pictorial structure with its own optical autonomy, as in the Twilight Landscape with House and Forked Branch, for example. 

Nearly two-thirds of the more than 400 figural pictures made by Paula Modersohn-Becker portray children, for the most part girls. She painted children of all ages, as well as sibling pairs and, last but not least, portrayals of mothers and children – themes that may also be found in works by Vincent van Gogh, Maurice Denis, and Paul Sérusier, or the young Pablo Picasso. Paula Modersohn-Becker, however, dedicated herself to pictures of children with the utmost intensity. 

During the period Paula Modersohn-Becker was creating art, she painted over 30 self-portraits; many of these were done in 1905 and 1906, the years she was planning and carrying out a move to Paris once and for all. More than ever before she had to rely upon herself; this aspect of having to get to know herself is expressed in the self-portraits. Also in the work of Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin numerous self-portraits attest to a need for self-reflection. 

Each time she came to Paris, Paula Modersohn-Becker went to the private academies of Colarossi or Julian in order to draw and paint nudes after live models. She was in good company. Drawings by Maurice Denis, Aristide Maillol, and Félix Vallotton prove that the studies of nudes were something done also by the avant-garde artists of the time. Their drawings – and many of Paula Modersohn-Becker’s drawings as well – are so-called croquis-nudes. 

Paula Modersohn-Becker’s pictures of children, mothers and children, and self-portraits as nudes, which she did in Paris in 1906, are among her major works. In them, the influence of Paul Gauguin is recorded, whose art Paula Modersohn-Becker discovered for herself in Paris in the spring of 1905. His portrayals of South-Sea islanders close to nature, with their grand language of forms and the expression of natural tranquility, were in keeping with her notion of »great simplicity« and her search for the essence of mankind. In her art it is children above all who stand for a naïve, quiet presence that absorbs their surroundings. By contrast, the rendering of the nudes of mothers and children in creature-like states symbolizes an elementary human relationship and its primal primitive power. Paula Modersohn-Becker thus shared in the trend of the primitive in contemporary art that had begun with Gauguin, and captivated artists ranging from Picasso to Matisse.

Far into the 19th century the expectation for a portrait was that it would be a fitting rendition and a recognizable likeness. In Paula Modersohn-Becker’s portraits, however, the individual recedes completely. Her portrayals of heads served her mainly as an analysis of the formal qualities of a face. »Brow, eyes, mouth, nose, cheeks, chin, that is all. It sounds so simple and yet it’s so very, very much«, is what she noted in 1903 after studying antique works of art and Egyptian mummy portraits at the Louvre. 

In the modern movement the still-life advanced to a major theme. For a long time still-life painting had been criticized by the academics as merely copying things, with no demands on creativity. But precisely this presumed modesty of the still-life afforded free space for experimentation, and the artists of the avant-garde used it to their advantage. Paul Cézanne in particular reflected basic inner-pictorial principles of creation in the still-life. We may see the influence Cézanne exerted on Paula Modersohn-Becker, for example, in the Still-Life with Apples and Bananas: It is visible in terms of formal reduction and uniting the picture objects in their material quality as well as in the changes in perspective she consciously employed.