Why This Unknown Painter Was One of the Most Radical Artists of Her Time
The rare life of an unshakeable creative
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“I am Me, and I hope to become more and more Me.” (Letter, 1906)
Sometimes, a voice from history rings out so true — so discernibly sharp — that it rings through the decades in between.
The letters and diaries of the German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker do just that. In them, she records the intensity of her wish to become an artist, along with her apprehensions of what that choice might mean.
Modersohn-Becker was a German painter whose daring, introspective work helped lay the foundations for modern art and positioned her as a quiet radical in the early 20th century.
Escape to Paris
One of her boldest decisions came in the first months of 1906, when under the cover of night, she absconded to Paris, leaving the bog-laced villages of northern Germany for wider, brighter pastures. She told no one but her closest friends and left her husband in the process.
Before she slipped away, she wrote emphatically to her mother:
“… I am going to amount to something! How big or how small, I can’t say myself, but it will be something complete in itself. This continuous rushing towards one’s goal, that’s the most beautiful thing in life. I place my head in your lap from whence I came and thank you for my life.” (Letter, February 1906)
Modersohn-Becker turned 30 that same month. It was a threshold moment, since she had long resolved to become an artist by her fourth decade. “Now whatever must be, will be,” she noted in her journal as she contemplated her new and uncertain prospects.
In Paris, artistic risks were soon undertaken. One of her very first works after arriving was Reclining Mother and Child II. A baby lies ensconced in its mother’s embrace, with a deep-blue backdrop to suggest night.
With its wide format and almost life-sized figures, it is an extraordinarily emphatic and vivid image. The paint is applied in thick sheets, forming an encrustation of pigment that seems to lend the painting a monumental weight. The figures are outlined in dark contours, drawing influence from the Cloisonnist technique of Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin.
But Modersohn-Becker made the subject all her own, as she would do in all her paintings throughout her short but blazing life.
Aspiring beginnings
Modersohn-Becker was born in 1876 in Dresden to a cultured, middle-class family, and was subject to all of the usual expectations placed upon young women at the time.
She pursued art against her parents’ preference for a more conventional path. After studying in Berlin, she set her sights on Paris where she might join one of the many art schools with the opportunity to draw from nude models. In 1899, her chance to travel came, the first of numerous spells she spent in the capital of modern art.
Her figure drawings from this time display complete control over tone and line, proving that her later “naive” style had an underpinning of skilled draughtsmanship.
In the meantime, under her mother’s guidance, she was encouraged to join an art colony at Worpswede, near Bremen, where she rented a room and a studio space. It was a breakthrough, yet a limited one. The colony’s style clung to 19th-century ideals, favouring bucolic, late-Romantic landscapes. For Modersohn-Becker, it was the human figure that interested her, with all the possibilities of achieving something more psychological and consciously modern with her art, especially relating to the female psyche.
Yet, progress was made. In Worpswede, she painted local women and children with a tender directness that confronted many of the expectations of how women ought to look, live and be portrayed.
In a painting like Maternity from 1903 — one of many nursing paintings she made throughout her life — Modersohn-Becker attended to her subject with a combination of compassion and a sharp focus on the uncertainties of motherhood. The image complements a diary entry from 1898 in which she reflected on the act of breastfeeding: “The woman was giving her life and her youth and strength to the child [..] without realising she was a heroic figure.”
Personal tribulations
In 1900, she married a notable landscape painter named Otto Modersohn, whom she met in Worpswede. He had a child of his own and had recently lost his first wife. Otto was enjoying commercial success as an artist and encouraged Paula in her own work.
Yet within a year, she found herself caught between her creative calling and the demands of domestic life. “In this first year of my marriage I have cried a great deal,” she wrote in 1902. “My experience tells me that marriage does not make one happier.”
She wasn’t alone in her longing for a more liberal life. Her close friend Rainer Maria Rilke, the poet who later became famous for Letters to a Young Poet, was also part of the Worpswede circle. They exchanged ideas, letters and confidences, each trying to make sense of how art and life could coexist. He admired her quiet intensity and once described her as possessing a “great, silent, self-sufficient strength.”
Rilke was married to the sculptor Clara Westhoff — who was also one of Modersohn-Becker’s closest friends — and the triangle between them was marked by shared ideals, difficult choices and a yearning for artistic freedom.
Modersohn-Becker’s restlessness was temporarily relieved in 1903 when she returned to Paris. Five weeks of intense cultural life, including meeting the sculptor Auguste Rodin, reinforced her wish to pursue greater depths of experimentation in her work.
Her paintings became emboldened with colour and a stronger focus on simplified forms.
Otto was baffled by the directness of these images, as he noted in his journal in the summer of 1903: “Paula hates to be conventional and is now falling prey to the error of preferring to make everything angular, ugly, bizarre, wooden [..] Hands like spoons, noses like cobs, mouths like wounds, faces like cretins.”
Seizing independence
On February 24, 1906, as she left for Paris for her longest sojourn in the city, Paula wrote in her journal: “I have left Otto Modersohn and am standing between my old life and my new life.”
Her final stay in Paris brought with it new urgency and intensity. She immersed herself in the city’s artistic ferment, absorbing the lessons of Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh. 1906 was an immensely happy and fruitful spell in her life, during which she painted virtually all of her most celebrated works.
Letters she wrote at this time express enchantment at her newly won freedom, as in this letter to her sister Milly:
“I’m going to be something — I am experiencing the most intense, happiest time of my life. Pray for me. Send me 60 francs to pay for models. Thanks. Don’t ever lose faith in me.” (Letter, May 1906)
It was, evidently, a time of unpredictable finances, in which she spent whatever money she had on painting materials and models’ fees.
The nude figure became a particularly favoured subject as her art ripened. As the art historian Diane Radycki notes, her nude works remade conventional Renaissance ideals into living, flesh-and-blood existential beings.
Moreover, when she painted Self-portrait on the 6th wedding Anniversary in the spring of 1906, she became one of the first female painters to depict herself nude — and possibly pregnant. This nude self-portrait with what appears to be a softly rounded belly wasn’t simply bold; it was radical.
Despite appearances, Modersohn-Becker was not carrying a child at the time. Her inquisitive, questioning look seems to propose possibilities for her future self: a bohemian and a would-be mother. It belies a deep ambivalence, since she had more than once expressed concern over the potential conflicts between an independent artistic career and motherhood.
Otto’s return, Paula’s end
Modersohn-Becker’s spell in Paris lasted until the late summer of 1906, when Otto (with the aid of friends) finally persuaded her to resume her life with him. By November, they were living together again, with Paula promised everything she might wish for by her husband.
For her, art remained her keenest source of happiness:
“The joys, the overwhelmingly beautiful hours take place in one’s art without other people noticing [..] That’s why one mostly is quite alone with one’s art.” (Letter, November 1906)
The following spring, she fell pregnant, and when she gave birth to their first child in November 1907, she was as happy then as at any other time in her life. “Her brown eyes are shining blissfully,” reported her mother.
Tragically, motherhood was short-lived. 18 days later, after resting in bed as advised by her doctors, she stood up and collapsed, suffering a pulmonary embolism. She died aged 31.
In a letter to a friend written a decade earlier, she had written something strangely prescient:
“I know that I shall not live very long. But I wonder, is that sad? Is a celebration more beautiful because it lasts longer? … My life is a celebration, a short, intense celebration.”
It was an abject fate, but I think we must heed the words of art historian Ellen C. Oppler who wrote that “we do Modersohn-Becker a terrible injustice by transforming her into a tragic, romantic heroine who died young and unfulfilled.”
In her short years, Modersohn-Becker created more than 700 paintings, about 1,400 drawings, and 11 prints made across only ten years — most of them unseen by the public until after her death.
Today, she is classed as a major figure in German Expressionism who ranks alongside figures like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde, and in many respects prefigured them. Hers was a life that gave rise to something rare and impressive: an inner self-reliance brewed with unfailing creative optimism. To me, she was an artist fully in tune with the riches a creative life can bring — a reminder that even in the face of constraint and doubt, it’s possible to remain defiantly hopeful.
I wish you well,
Chris
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I’m Christopher P Jones — art writer and author of the Looking at Art series of books. You can find out more at chrisjoneswrites.co.uk and my regular blog on Medium.
Thank you for surrounding the art you present with personal stories about the people who imagined and made the work.
A superb figurative artist influenced by other superb figurative artists. She fulfills my two criteria for a picture that I admire, can the artist draw? and I wish I had done it.