Hand mit Blumenstrau\u00df<\/em>\u00a0(Hand with Flower Bouquet), ca. 1902<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n![\"Painting](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/Schirn_Presse_Modersohn-Becker_Hand_mit_Blumenstrauss_um_1902_Privatsammlung.jpg?w=524\")
<\/p>\nPaula Modersohn-Becker, Hand mit Blumenstrau\u00df<\/em> (Hand with Flower Bouquet), ca. 1902.<\/div>\nPhoto<\/span>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Private Collection<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n\nThough she\u2019s now best known for her portraits, some of Modersohn-Becker\u2019s 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, \u201cThese are my \u2018modern women<\/a>.\u2019\u201d Some of her more unusual works are composed such that women\u2014often girls\u2014are situated within settings that share certain attributes with them.<\/p>\nIn 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\u2019s 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 \u201cbud\u2014still waiting to develop.\u201d This painting can be treated similarly, as an image of an unseen person (possibly the artist herself) whose life has yet to fully unfold.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n
\n\n\nSelbstbildnis mit rotem Bl\u00fctenkranz und Kette<\/em>\u00a0(Self-Portrait with Red Floral Wreath and Necklace), 1906\/07<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/Schirn_Presse_Modersohn-Becker_Selbstbildnis_mit_rotem_Kranz_Niedersaechsisches_Landesmuseum_Hannover_offiziell.jpg?w=545\")
<\/p>\nPaula Modersohn-Becker, Selbstbildnis mit rotem Blu\u0308tenkranz und Kette<\/em> (Self-Portrait with Red Floral Wreath and Necklace), 1906\/07.Photo<\/span>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>\u00a9Landesmuseum Hannover – ARTHOTHEK\/Niedersa\u0308chsisches Landesmuseum Hannover, Rut-und Klaus-Bahlsen-Stiftung<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n\nIn 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. \u201cI am becoming something\u2014I am living the most intensely happy time of my life,\u201d she wrote the year she began this painting, in which she is pictured from the shoulders up with a garland in her hair.<\/p>\n
What is most striking about Modersohn-Becker\u2019s self-portraits is how little they look like her. That would be a count against them if their stylization didn\u2019t 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\u2014she even used the handle of her brushes to lend her medium a textured quality.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n
\n\n\nSelbstbildnis am 6. Hochzeitstag<\/em>\u00a0(Self-Portrait on the Sixth Wedding Day), 1906<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n![\"Painting](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/Schirn_Presse_Modersohn-Becker_Selbstbildnis.jpg?w=419\")
<\/p>\nPaula Modersohn-Becker, Selbstbildnis am 6. Hochzeitstag<\/em> (Self-Portrait on the Sixth Wedding Day), 1906.<\/div>\nPhoto<\/span>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Museen Bo\u0308ttcherstra\u00dfe, Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n\nFor Modersohn-Becker, the nude form held spiritual significance. With Otto, she practiced \u201cbathing in the air<\/a>\u201d\u2014a 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\u2019s body may explain why, in this self-portrait, she appears wearing only a necklace and some fabric concealing her lower half.<\/p>\nIn 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\u2019s 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. \u201cBefore Modersohn-Becker, there was no one,\u201d Diane Radycki, the artist\u2019s biographer,\u00a0told the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em><\/a>\u00a0in 2013. \u201cWomen did not approach themselves that way.\u201d (Despite her deservedly important place in feminist art history, the artist herself was not exactly a fighter for women\u2019s rights. \u201cWomen\u2019s emancipation is very unattractive and unpleasant in these tumultuous crowds,\u201d she once wrote.)<\/p>\nBehind 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,\u00a0Selbstbildnis am 6. Hochzeitstag<\/em>\u00a0may never have been seen\u00a0by anyone other than the artist during her lifetime, even though it now ranks among her most famous works.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nAlte B\u00e4uerin mit auf der Brust gekreuzten H\u00e4nden<\/em>\u00a0(Old Peasant Woman), 1907<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n![\"Painting](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/Schirn_Presse_Modersohn-Becker_Alte_Frau_Detroit_Art_Institute.jpg?w=447\")
<\/p>\nPaula Modersohn-Becker, Alte Ba\u0308uerin mit auf der Brust gekreuzten Ha\u0308nden<\/em> (Old Peasant Woman), 1907.<\/div>\nPhoto<\/span>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Detroit Institute of Arts<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n\nModersohn-Becker\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s baggy eyes and flabby skin. Modersohn-Becker left these details of the woman\u2019s 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\u2014a touch that smacks of influence from the Expressionist movement\u2014and behind her is an array of sparsely painted leaves that appear to dissolve into abstraction.<\/p>\n
It was flourishes like these that landed Modersohn-Becker in controversy following her death. In the \u201930s, as the Nazis labeled movements like Expressionism \u201cdegenerate art\u201d because they put forward a style that wasn\u2019t quintessentially German, Modersohn-Becker\u2019s 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 \u201cEntartete Kunst\u201d show in Munich. Still, a private museum in her name\u2014founded by Ludwig Riselius, a coffee magnate and Nazi sympathizer who nonetheless promoted \u201cdegenerate art<\/a>\u201d\u2014remained unscathed during the war.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nMutter mit Kind auf dem Arm, Halbakt II<\/em>\u00a0(Mother with Child in Her Arms, Half-Length Nude II), 1907<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n![\"Painting](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/Schirn_Presse_Modersohn-Becker_Mutter_mit_Kind_auf_dem_Arm_Halbakt_II.jpg?w=434\")
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\nThough she\u2019s now best known for her portraits, some of Modersohn-Becker\u2019s 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, \u201cThese are my \u2018modern women<\/a>.\u2019\u201d Some of her more unusual works are composed such that women\u2014often girls\u2014are situated within settings that share certain attributes with them.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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 \u201cbud\u2014still waiting to develop.\u201d This painting can be treated similarly, as an image of an unseen person (possibly the artist herself) whose life has yet to fully unfold.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n 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. \u201cI am becoming something\u2014I am living the most intensely happy time of my life,\u201d she wrote the year she began this painting, in which she is pictured from the shoulders up with a garland in her hair.<\/p>\n What is most striking about Modersohn-Becker\u2019s self-portraits is how little they look like her. That would be a count against them if their stylization didn\u2019t 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\u2014she even used the handle of her brushes to lend her medium a textured quality.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n For Modersohn-Becker, the nude form held spiritual significance. With Otto, she practiced \u201cbathing in the air<\/a>\u201d\u2014a 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\u2019s body may explain why, in this self-portrait, she appears wearing only a necklace and some fabric concealing her lower half.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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. \u201cBefore Modersohn-Becker, there was no one,\u201d Diane Radycki, the artist\u2019s biographer,\u00a0told the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em><\/a>\u00a0in 2013. \u201cWomen did not approach themselves that way.\u201d (Despite her deservedly important place in feminist art history, the artist herself was not exactly a fighter for women\u2019s rights. \u201cWomen\u2019s emancipation is very unattractive and unpleasant in these tumultuous crowds,\u201d she once wrote.)<\/p>\n 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,\u00a0Selbstbildnis am 6. Hochzeitstag<\/em>\u00a0may never have been seen\u00a0by anyone other than the artist during her lifetime, even though it now ranks among her most famous works.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n Modersohn-Becker\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s baggy eyes and flabby skin. Modersohn-Becker left these details of the woman\u2019s 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\u2014a touch that smacks of influence from the Expressionist movement\u2014and behind her is an array of sparsely painted leaves that appear to dissolve into abstraction.<\/p>\n It was flourishes like these that landed Modersohn-Becker in controversy following her death. In the \u201930s, as the Nazis labeled movements like Expressionism \u201cdegenerate art\u201d because they put forward a style that wasn\u2019t quintessentially German, Modersohn-Becker\u2019s 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 \u201cEntartete Kunst\u201d show in Munich. Still, a private museum in her name\u2014founded by Ludwig Riselius, a coffee magnate and Nazi sympathizer who nonetheless promoted \u201cdegenerate art<\/a>\u201d\u2014remained unscathed during the war.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\nSelbstbildnis mit rotem Bl\u00fctenkranz und Kette<\/em>\u00a0(Self-Portrait with Red Floral Wreath and Necklace), 1906\/07<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\nSelbstbildnis am 6. Hochzeitstag<\/em>\u00a0(Self-Portrait on the Sixth Wedding Day), 1906<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\nAlte B\u00e4uerin mit auf der Brust gekreuzten H\u00e4nden<\/em>\u00a0(Old Peasant Woman), 1907<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\nMutter mit Kind auf dem Arm, Halbakt II<\/em>\u00a0(Mother with Child in Her Arms, Half-Length Nude II), 1907<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n