The exhibition presented the highly distinctive production of Paula Modersohn-Becker, an artist who held the status of one of the radical innovators of German modernism. She was known as one of the first to introduce modern French impulses into German painting – that is, inspirations from painters like Cézanne and Gauguin, whom she studied in Paris. But she was also known for her new view of the female figure in particular, and for an oeuvre that created a special combination of the non-idyllizing and the archaic. This applied to both landscape and figure paintings, and not least to her representations of women and children, of the mother figure and herself.

Paula Modersohn-Becker put down roots in the artists’ colony in Worpswede outside Bremen, but spent several periods in Paris. Several of her works were included in the Nazis’ exhibition of Entartete Kunst in 1937. She was also known for her close friendship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose Requiem für eine Freundin was written for her. Paula Modersohn-Becker died at just 31 years old after having borne her first child, and her artistic career was thus a brief but intense and quite unique achievement.

Modersohn-Becker was at once very old-fashioned and ultra-modern. She staged herself in one self-portrait after another in a variety of self-presentations, but her gaze at the self and the surrounding world was neither flickering nor inconstant; rather, it was archaic, as if it came from another time and another place. Her gaze exposed central elements of a female universe where, for example, breast-feeding, children, breasts, fatigue, and the role of the mother were also parts of her observation. Paula Modersohn-Becker was considered the first woman in the history of art to paint full-length nude self-portraits.

In her lifestyle as a woman of that age, Paula Modersohn-Becker also stood out. She was born in Dresden and grew up as one of six children in a culturally open-minded family that supported her artistic ambition. At the time, women had no access to the art academies, so Modersohn-Becker traveled to an art school for women in Berlin, where she developed her talent further and drew inspiration from the city’s galleries and art museums. In 1898, she went to live at the artist colony in the northern German village of Worpswede. The colony’s artists enjoyed success on the German contemporary art scene, and the colony attracted a variety of artists from the outside world, including the young poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who became a close friend of Modersohn-Becker. In 1901, she married one of the leading figures of the artist colony, Otto Modersohn. At Worpswede, she painted landscapes, but mainly she produced pictures of children and adults and the residents of the village in her own increasingly simplified visual idiom.

Modersohn-Becker left Worpswede several times to gain inspiration and develop her artistic skills in Paris, the melting pot for modern art at the time. At the beginning of 1907, she returned to her husband and to Worpswede. In the fall, she died suddenly 18 days after giving birth to her daughter Mathilde.