When it comes to art history, firsts are notoriously tough to pinpoint—it can be difficult to definitively state that someone did something before anyone else when the world is so big and when visual expression is so diverse. But Paula Modersohn-Becker is believed to be a true pioneer at a least a few respects. She is considered to be among the first modern women to create a nude self-portrait and one of the first to paint such an image of herself pregnant. Her biographer, Diane Radycki, went one step further, labeling the artist the first modernist woman painter altogether in a 2013 book.
These are strong claims to fame for an artist who never lived past her 30s. Born in Dresden, Germany, in 1876, she died in 1907 of an embolism at age 31. Still, in that short time, she created 734 paintings, some of which have made their way into the canon, thanks to the work of feminist art historians like Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock, and Wendy Slatkin. In the course of her abbreviated career, she managed to shake up portraiture and to effectively predict the course modernism would take in the years after her—even if many around Modersohn-Becker didn’t know just how important she was. (During her lifetime, she had few admirers. Among those who did take notice of her was the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.)
Currently on view at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Germany, is one of the biggest Modersohn-Becker retrospectives in recent memory. Curated by Ingrid Pfeiffer, it features 120 paintings and drawings by the artist and offers a comprehensive overview of her output. With that show on view through mid-February, below is a guide to five key works by Modersohn-Becker.
Hand mit Blumenstrauß (Hand with Flower Bouquet), ca. 1902
Though she’s now best known for her portraits, some of Modersohn-Becker’s first mature works were landscapes, and she never lost an interest in nature and the people who inhabit it. She came to see humanly forms in her landscapes, and while painting a row of birch trees, she once wrote, “These are my ‘modern women.’” Some of her more unusual works are composed such that women—often girls—are situated within settings that share certain attributes with them.
In this painting, a hand gracefully holds a bouquet of similarly colored flowers before the viewer. The image is cropped tightly, so that all that fills the view is the hand and the flowers. The austerity of Modersohn-Becker’s painting is only underlined by the dreary background, which could be viewed as a clouds parting to reveal a cerulean sky. In 1898, Modersohn-Becker wrote that a young girl who sat for her paintings was a “bud—still waiting to develop.” This painting can be treated similarly, as an image of an unseen person (possibly the artist herself) whose life has yet to fully unfold.
Selbstbildnis mit rotem Blütenkranz und Kette (Self-Portrait with Red Floral Wreath and Necklace), 1906/07
In 1906, Modersohn-Becker underwent a major life change when she and her husband, the painter Otto Modersohn, separated. All alone for one of the first times in her life, Modersohn-Becker did some soul searching. “I am becoming something—I am living the most intensely happy time of my life,” she wrote the year she began this painting, in which she is pictured from the shoulders up with a garland in her hair.
What is most striking about Modersohn-Becker’s self-portraits is how little they look like her. That would be a count against them if their stylization didn’t seem so purposeful. Like many of her modernist colleagues, Modersohn-Becker was interested in distilling visual expression until it existed in its most basic form, and the quest to do so often led her to look to ancient imagery, in particular Egyptian portraiture that she saw at the Louvre. Like the unknown artists behind those paintings, Modersohn-Becker chose to keep her portrait sparse, with her parted hair rendered using ill-defined brown strokes. Also like those Egyptian artists, Modersohn-Becker opted to leave her paint uneven—she even used the handle of her brushes to lend her medium a textured quality.
Selbstbildnis am 6. Hochzeitstag (Self-Portrait on the Sixth Wedding Day), 1906
For Modersohn-Becker, the nude form held spiritual significance. With Otto, she practiced “bathing in the air”—a practice derived from the Lebensreform movement that involved shedding their clothes and washing themselves in their garden in Worpswede. Later on, after she and Otto separated, nudity became only more important as she strove to attain a kind of liberty that was rare for women of her era. Her belief in the importance of baring one’s body may explain why, in this self-portrait, she appears wearing only a necklace and some fabric concealing her lower half.
In typical form for Modersohn-Becker, this is not a traditional portrait of a nude woman. Modersohn-Becker pares down her form to emphasize her pregnant belly’s curves, and she stares back at the viewer with a look that has an unusual searching quality. Previously, this sort of subject matter had primarily been the province of male painters, who often painted their female subjects in sensuous, if not outright sexualizing, ways. Modersohn-Becker reclaimed the nude female figure and lent her a psychology. “Before Modersohn-Becker, there was no one,” Diane Radycki, the artist’s biographer, told the New Yorker in 2013. “Women did not approach themselves that way.” (Despite her deservedly important place in feminist art history, the artist herself was not exactly a fighter for women’s rights. “Women’s emancipation is very unattractive and unpleasant in these tumultuous crowds,” she once wrote.)
Behind her is a cascade of lime-green wedges that function as a background. Because there is nothing within it that would connote everyday life, this painting seems not to exist within reality, and indeed it elides one key fact: Modersohn-Becker was not, and had never been, pregnant when she painted this work on the sixth anniversary of the day she married Otto. According to Ingrid Pfeiffer, the curator of the Schirn Kunsthalle show, Selbstbildnis am 6. Hochzeitstag may never have been seen by anyone other than the artist during her lifetime, even though it now ranks among her most famous works.
Alte Bäuerin mit auf der Brust gekreuzten Händen (Old Peasant Woman), 1907
Modersohn-Becker’s middle-class upbringing made her quite unlike the peasants on whom she often trained her eye, but according to people who knew the artist, she treated her subjects as her equals no less. Partly because she didn’t have a large budget to offer her sitters, she relied on workers around her in the German countryside, and she did not idealize them when they posed for her. In this painting, an elderly female peasant sits with her hands crossed over her chest; on her lap rests a flower whose sprightliness seems to contrast with the woman’s baggy eyes and flabby skin. Modersohn-Becker left these details of the woman’s face intact so as to depict her as she was. Yet note the painting can hardly be called realist by any stretch. Her face is outlined in dark browns—a touch that smacks of influence from the Expressionist movement—and behind her is an array of sparsely painted leaves that appear to dissolve into abstraction.
It was flourishes like these that landed Modersohn-Becker in controversy following her death. In the ’30s, as the Nazis labeled movements like Expressionism “degenerate art” because they put forward a style that wasn’t quintessentially German, Modersohn-Becker’s works faced the threat of destruction. During that decade, several dozen of her artworks were confiscated from German museums, and one of her self-portraits ended up in the notorious 1937 “Entartete Kunst” show in Munich. Still, a private museum in her name—founded by Ludwig Riselius, a coffee magnate and Nazi sympathizer who nonetheless promoted “degenerate art”—remained unscathed during the war.
Mutter mit Kind auf dem Arm, Halbakt II (Mother with Child in Her Arms, Half-Length Nude II), 1907
Motherhood has occupied a predominant place in the mythology surrounding Modersohn-Becker, who did get pregnant in 1907 when she reunited with Otto. But despite the fact that Modersohn-Becker may be best known for her paintings of mothers and children, she only crafted a handful of images of the sort. One is this painting, which pushes that motif toward more expressive ends. Modersohn-Becker’s prior images like it had largely been naturalistic; this one, however, casts its subjects in an odd purplish tone, their cheeks accentuated by way of pink swatches. Past pictures of mother and child by Modersohn-Becker had drawn on religious iconography, with their compositions often mimicking historical ones featuring the Madonna and Jesus Christ. Here, Modersohn-Becker recycles that imagery and turns it more abstract, with an oversized frond in the background acting as a vague gesture toward an Edenic setting.
Modersohn-Becker was hardly the first female painter to tackle parenthood in her work. Mary Cassatt tenderly portrayed little girls in sun-splashed settings, and Berthe Morisot offered her viewers a look inside the bourgeois homes where Frenchwomen cared for their children. Modersohn-Becker’s paintings of mothers, on the other hand, are shorn of any sentimentality—they are done at a remove, seemingly without the warmth that typically accompanies these precious images. To what extent can we read these paintings as emblematic of Modersohn-Becker’s own attitude toward motherhood? It can be hard to say, although Sheila Heti, a writer whose work has often focused on that subject, endeavored to do as much when she wrote, in a 2017 Brooklyn Rail essay, “Modersohn-Becker’s mothers feel a glad and resolved devotion. Her mothers are bountiful—their giving is fluid, unreserved; perhaps it’s because Modersohn-Becker wanted children; idealized that future.”