The Artistic Homes of Paula Modersohn-Becker

This journey would take her across three locations that profoundly shaped her artistic life: Germany’s capital, Berlin; Worpswede, a rural artist colony and farming community in Northern Germany; and Paris, Europe’s cultural center around 1900. Rarely depicted in geographic detail, they served chiefly as places of inner inspiration as she strove to realize her full potential. Her production would transform from student work in Berlin to her first artistically mature drawings and paintings in idyllic Worpswede and continue with her deepening painting practice in Paris, where she experienced both creative triumph and personal change. Along the way, she would produce over 2,000 paintings and works on paper, developing an innovative personal style that would cement her future place as one of Germany’s most revered artists. 

Berlin

Modersohn-Becker took her first drawing lessons in London in 1892 and continued studying in her hometown of Bremen between 1893 and 1896 before moving to Berlin to pursue full-time artistic training. Women were denied entrance to Germany’s state-run art schools until 1919, but with the financial support of extended family and an unexpected inheritance, Modersohn-Becker embarked on two years of study at the Association for Women Artists, a well-respected school in the center of Berlin open to both amateurs and professionals. 

There, she embraced drawing as an essential part of her practice. In a diary entry from May 1896, she described the challenging nature of her drawing instruction: “I’m still battling my material with great difficulty. I find this casual use of charcoal terribly difficult.” Yet she persevered, writing to her father, “I’m drawing as much as I can every day.” Modersohn-Becker’s portrait and figure drawings produced over the course of her studies in Berlin manifest a deepening understanding of physiognomy and the human form. For example Standing Male Nude with Bowed Head, Leaning against the Wall is infused with dramatic light and shade; defined, if blocky muscles; and a practiced handling of charcoal and crayon.

The artist’s drawing and disposition became more confident in 1897 thanks to the guidance of her most influential instructor in Berlin, the Swedish-German painter Jeanna Bauck (1840–1926). Modersohn-Becker described Bauck as warm, unconventional, and refreshingly uninterested in her appearance. She wrote her parents that Bauck hoped to awaken in her students an “artistic vision … on a higher plane and infinitely more difficult to acquire.”

I’m breathless … . I want to go further and further; I can hardly wait until I’m a real artist.

—Paula Modersohn-Becker in her diary, 1898

After embarking on her lessons with Bauck, Modersohn-Becker approached her work more intensively, stressing to her father: “I believe that if I am ever to get anywhere, I have to devote everything I have to it.” The progress she made is evident in Seated Female Nude, where she confidently depicts a female model in dark strokes of charcoal, creating the highlights of her form by rubbing, stumping, and erasing the media.

During her time in Berlin, Modersohn-Becker frequently visited exhibitions of contemporary art in the prominent galleries of Schulte, Gurlitt, and Keller & Reiner and studied ancient and modern art in Berlin’s many museums. Among the contemporary works she mentioned in her diaries were those by the Hungarian József Rippl-Rónai; the Germans Max Liebermann, Max Klinger, and Walter Leistikow; and the Norwegian Edvard Munch.

Worpswede

In September of 1898, Modersohn-Becker moved from Berlin to Worpswede, a village 18 miles northeast of Bremen that would become an intermittent home until her death in 1907. After her first summer visit there, she described the town in lyrical terms: “Worpswede, Worpswede. Worpswede! My Sunken Bell mood. Birches, birches, pine trees and old willows. Beautiful brown moors—exquisite brown! … a wonderland, a land of gods.” Established in the 13th century, the moorland, known as Teufelsmoor, was a boggy area, difficult to farm but filled with wetland useful for grazing livestock. In time, the region’s farmers found a way to earn a living by digging peat, an alternative source of fuel to wood, and shipping it to Bremen through a series of canals.

She speaks the language of these people [in Worpswede], listens to stories about their hardships and their deaths, and dances with the father of the bride at poor people’s weddings.

—The curator Gustav Pauli, an early supporter of Modersohn-Becker

Between 1898 and 1899, Modersohn-Becker made a group of around 50 large-scale figure drawings and bust-length portraits placed in unspecified settings, their faces detailed and backgrounds only suggested in heavily worked charcoal, chalk, and pastel. She chose the impoverished villagers as her models, primarily young girls and the elderly from the local poorhouse, the only individuals available because they were not at work in the fields. The force of these intensely rendered drawings derives not only from their superb handling but also from the way in which they capture the truth and vulnerability of their sitters. Whereas many of her contemporaries depicted the habitants of Worpswede generically and unsympathetically, Modersohn-Becker represented them with precision and connected to them deeply.

The most unusual and characteristic of Modersohn-Becker’s landscapes are her close-up paintings of birch trees. She personified the delicate trunks as slender, devout girls who pray for happiness but accept their sadness. As she wrote in her diary, “I wandered beneath the birch trees. There they stood chaste and naked. Their bare branches stretched out to the sky, praying devoutly, begging for happiness… . [but] they stand still now and mourn, gently, gently, with their little hands folded in piety.”

Between 1904 and 1905, Modersohn-Becker painted a group of important oils that depict young women in a forest setting. While this was not an uncommon subject at the time, the artist created a genre that was entirely her own. As her friend and fellow student in Worpswede, Ottilie Reylaender-Böhme, later recalled, Modersohn-Becker depicted the Worpswede villagers “free of any sentimentality.” In Girl Blowing a Flute in the Birch Forest, the largely vertical format echoes the orientation of the trees. Paired with the high horizon line, it creates the impression that the girl is growing from the same root system. 

In addition to her prolific work inspired by the landscape and people of Worpswede, Modersohn-Becker found reassurance and a home in its community. She became friends with sculptor Clara Westhoff and began a close relationship with painter Otto Modersohn, whose gentle personality and art attracted her. The long hours she spent in Modersohn’s studio discussing art formed the basis of their relationship, and shortly after his first wife died in 1900, Paula Becker accepted his proposal of marriage. In 1899, her friendship with artist Heinrich Vogeler prompted Modersohn-Becker to experiment with etching, practicing on Vogeler’s press to make The Goosegirl. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke was also a close friend, entering Modersohn-Becker’s life in 1900 when he joined the artistic “family” that gathered in Vogeler’s Worpswede villa. Following Modersohn-Becker’s early death, Rilke wrote a mournful poem titled “Requiem for a Friend,” lamenting, “It troubles me that you should stray back, you, who have achieved more transformation than any other woman.”

Paris

Modersohn-Becker’s first visit to Paris—then Europe’s cultural capital—occurred on New Year’s Eve, 1900. It was the first of four sojourns to broaden her artistic horizons in the big city. From this point on, in her mind, there was only one vital destiation: Paris. Although her sketchbooks are filled with impressions of life on the streets and copies of paintings and sculptures in the Louvre, the city itself is virtually invisible in her paintings. She considered Paris a place where she could learn and grow, attending art classes at the private academies open to women and, as she had done in Berlin, visiting galleries and museums. Among the artists she saw and admired at the galleries of Ambroise Vollard, Georges Petit, and Paul Durand-Ruel, as well as in private collections, were Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Édouard Manet, Auguste Rodin, Henri Rousseau, and Édouard Vuillard. 

During her fourth trip to Paris in 1905, as Modersohn-Becker sought creative and personal independence after she left her husband, she began painting nude compositions of mothers, children, and her own body. From Paris, she wrote to her friend Martha Vogeler: “You shall see. Now that I’m free, I am going to make something of myself … With faith in God and myself, I’m painting life-size nudes and still-lifes.” One of the most intriguing, original groups of paintings from this period are her exotic child nudes posed amid fruit and flowers, often raised on a dais. The artist transformed her palette from earthy browns and reds to brightly hued shades of red, blue, and orange.

At the same time, her depictions of mothers with their babies—Reclining Mother with Child II and Kneeling Mother with Child at Her Breast—boldly fuse the nude with the motif of the nursing mother.

Return to Worpswede

Given the momentum that Modersohn-Becker gained in Paris during the spring and summer of 1906, it is hard to understand exactly what caused her sudden about-face in September, when she decided to return to Worpswede. At the beginning of the month her resolve to remain independent seemed firm: “Let me go, Otto … . I do not want you as my husband. I do not want it.” But within a week she retracted her words and suggested that her husband come to Paris to see what they could salvage of their relationship: “My harsh letter was written during a time when I was terribly upset … Also my wish not to have a child by you was only for the moment, and stood on weak legs.” The most likely explanation for this change was the realization that she couldn’t support herself financially. The best solution under the circumstances was to reach a new agreement with her husband, who was still begging for her return. In the winter of 1906, Otto visited her in Paris, and they became pregnant.

She wrote to her friend Clara Rilke-Westhoff, explaining her decision to return to Worpswede in early 1907: “I shall be returning to my former life, but with a few differences. I, too, am different now, somewhat more independent, no longer so full of illusions. This past summer I realized that I am not the sort of woman to stand alone in life. Apart from the eternal worries about money, it is precisely the freedom I have had which was able to lure me away from myself. I would like so much to get to the point where I can create something that is me.” Upon her return to Worpswede, Modersohn-Becker continued to create brightly colored still-lifes and images of elderly women.

On November 3 her daughter Mathilde was born. And two and a half weeks later, Modersohn-Becker died of a postpartum embolism.

Two decades after her untimely death, Modersohn-Becker’s work would be regarded as an important precursor to Expressionism. With the publication of her letters and diaries in 1919 and the founding of the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in 1927, her fame grew exponentially. Yet despite her iconic status in Germany, this is the first museum exhibition of her work in the United States—one the Art Institute is proud to host. I invite you to take your own journey of discovery through the life and works of this singular artist with Paula Modersohn-Becker: I Am Me, opening October 12 in Galleries 182–84.

—Jay A. Clarke, Rothman Family Curator of Prints and Drawings

Sponsors

Support for Paula Modersohn-Becker: I Am Me is provided by an anonymous donor.

Members of the Luminary Trust provide annual leadership support for the museum’s operations, including exhibition development, conservation and collection care, and educational programming. The Luminary Trust includes an anonymous donor, Karen Gray-Krehbiel and John Krehbiel, Jr., Kenneth C. Griffin, the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris, Josef and Margot Lakonishok, Ann and Samuel M. Mencoff, Sylvia Neil and Dan Fischel, Cari and Michael J. Sacks, and the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation.

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