Nine Things to Know about Paula Modersohn-Becker

A remarkably prolific artist, she essentially created her own genre based on her experiences as a woman and on the lives of the men and women she painted. Over the course of her short life, she produced more than 700 paintings and 1,400 drawings, including the first nude self-portraits known to be made by a woman.

Here are nine biographical fragments of this visionary artist.

I know that I shall not live very long. But I wonder, is that sad? Is a celebration more beautiful because it lasts longer? And my life is a celebration, a short, intense celebration.

—Paula Modersohn-Becker, 1897

#1
Born Dresden in 1876, Paula Becker grew up in a well-to-do family who valued cultural and intellectual pursuits. She first studied drawing in London in 1892 and then continued her education in Bremen, where her family had moved in 1893. By the age of 16, she had a studio in her parent’s house.

#2
She moved to Berlin to study at the Association for Women Artists, a well-respected school open to both amateurs and professionals. Women were denied entrance to Germany’s state-run art schools until 1919.

#3
In summer 1898, Becker moved to Worpswede, a rural artist colony north of Bremen, and became friends with sculptor Clara Westhoff, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and the painter Otto Modersohn, whose gentle personality and art attracted her. She did portraits, mostly drawings, of the villagers and people from the poorhouse—nursing mothers, the elderly, and children—striving to show the reality rather than the ideal.

#4
Becker went to Paris in 1899, where she studied anatomy and visited galleries, museums, and private collections. Among the artists whose works she saw and admired were Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Édouard Manet, Auguste Rodin, Henri Rousseau, and Édouard Vuillard. 

#5
She returned to Worpswede in 1900 and spent long hours in Modersohn’s studio, discussing art. Shortly after his first wife died in 1900, Becker accepted his proposal of marriage. Though her parents tried to pressure her to stop painting in order to assume her new role as a wife and mother to Elsbeth, Otto’s daughter from his first marriage, she refused to give up her art practice.

#6
She returned to Paris in 1903 and 1905, where she met artists such as Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis and Auguste Rodin and studied everything from Egyptian mummy portraits to Gothic sculpture to works by Edvard Munch, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. Her artistic vision, her desire to get to the essence of things rather than focusing on surface details, set her apart from the Worpswede circle, including her husband, Otto.

#7
In 1906, determined to “create something that is me,” she left her husband and moved to Paris. She painted still lifes and landscapes but truly pushed boundaries by painting nude and semi-nude self-portraits as well as dramatic and expressionist paintings of mothers and children. The vast majority of her paintings were created between 1900 and 1907.

I don’t even know how I should sign my name. I’m not Modersohn, but I’m no longer Paula Becker anymore either. I am Me, and I hope to become Me more and more.

—Paula Modersohn-Becker In a letter to Ranier Maria Rilke, 1906

“the gentle vibration of things”

Modersohn-Becker focused on deep personal expression rather than surface representation.

#8
After reconciling with her husband in Paris in 1906, Modersohn-Becker became pregnant. They returned to Worpswede, where their daughter, Mathilde, was born that November. At the doctor’s insistence, she stayed in bed, which was not unusual at the time. When she left her bed for the first time, two and a half weeks later, she picked up her daughter and fell to the floor, struck down by a postpartum embolism. Her last words before she died were, “What a pity.”

#9
Soon after her death, her letters and diaries were published, and her works were displayed in a series of exhibitions. Eight years later, the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum was founded, the first museum devoted to a woman artist.

Now on view, Paula Modersohn-Becker: I Am Me runs through January 12, 2025.

Learn more about the artist in this article by curator Jay A. Clarke.

Topics

• Exhibitions
• Artists
• Modern Art
• European Painting and Sculpture
• Prints and Drawings