Paula Modersohn-Becker

Paula Modersohn-Becker was born in Dresden in 1876. She studied painting in London and then at the Berlin School of Art for Women, one of the few institutions that admitted women to serious artistic training. In 1898 she moved to the artist colony at Worpswede in northern Germany, where she met and married the painter Otto Modersohn in 1901. She was dissatisfied. Not with Modersohn personally, but with the limits of what Worpswede offered — a rural naturalism that felt insufficient for what she was trying to do. She made four trips to Paris, the last of which she made without her husband's permission or knowledge, to study Cézanne, Gauguin, and the Egyptian and archaic sculpture at the Louvre. She wrote in her journal: "I know that I will not live very long. But I wonder, is that sad?" Her paintings have a quality unlike anything being made around her. Solid, direct, a little strange — the bodies in them have weight and interiority, as if the subject has a life that continues outside the frame. Her nudes of peasant women, mothers, and children discard the idealization the academy required. Her self-portraits — particularly Self-Portrait on My Sixth Wedding Anniversary (1906), in which she is nude to the waist, hands over her belly, looking out with complete self-possession — are among the most quietly radical works in art history. It was the first known painted female nude self-portrait. She died on November 20, 1907, eighteen days after giving birth to her daughter Mathilde. A postembolism. She was thirty-one. Her last recorded words, as she collapsed: "Schade" — a German word meaning "what a pity" or "what a shame," depending on how you hear it. Her husband controlled her estate and reputation for decades after her death. She was rediscovered by feminist art historians in the 1970s. The Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen, opened in 1927, was the first museum in the world dedicated to a female artist.

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