The Art Education of Paula Modersohn-Becker

THE ART EDUCATION OF PAULA MODERSOHN-BECKER

By Susan Bawell Weber

Paula Modersohn-Becker was a German painter, at the forefront of early Expressionism. She was born Paula Becker in 1876 in Dresden, where she grew up with her family before moving to Bremen in 1888. One of seven children, she grew up in a cultivated and intellectual household.

At her father’s insistence, she completed her training to become a teacher and then studied from 1892 to 1896 at art schools and private institutions in Bremen. She spent 1892 at the London School of Arts and the period of 1896 to 1898 at the association of Berlin Women Artists at a time when women were still not admitted to many art schools.

After meeting members of the artists’ colony in Worpswede in 1898, Becker decided to join them. She felt that she could more easily achieve artistic simplicity in a rural environment, and she studied there with Fritz Mackensen and Otto Modersohn. She became close friends with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and his wife, Clara Westhoff, who were often in Worpswede. Becker then married Modersohn in 1901. This would prove to be a difficult relationship.

Of all of the Worpswede group, Modersohn-Becker was most concerned with art history and modern art. During this time, her themes were drawn from the everyday peasant community around her as she attempted to depict a simple, naturalistic rural life. After becoming disenchanted with the Worpswede School and the confines of the village, she decided that her further progress depended on fresh experience.

Modersohn-Becker soon left for Paris, where she attended the Académie Colarossi and the École des Beaux-Arts. (She would later return to Paris three more times.) She also spent time in the museums, studying ancient Fayum mummy portraits, Gothic sculptures, Rembrandt and the Impressionists. The most significant influences on her work were Cézanne, van Gogh, and Gauguin. She felt that Gauguin especially helped her to achieve the simplicity she wished to portray in her portraits.

Paula Modersohn-Becker, Two Girls in Front of Birch Trees (image courtesy of the Saint Louis Art Museum)

During her stays in Paris, Modersohn-Becker also met celebrated artists Munch, Klinger, Bonnard, and Vuillard. She was constantly striving to educate herself and find ideas that she made her own by developing a personal abstract vision. Although it is viewed as normal today, at the time it was extraordinary for a woman to go off on her own to pursue her own development.

In February 1906, Modersohn-Becker again set off for Paris, wanting to break away from the colony for good. She was also separated from her husband. She had become a prolific portraitist, mainly painting children, peasants and old women. It was at this time that she produced her most striking works of mother and child images. She portrayed many nude mothers as life-giving vessels for their babies — an image of femininity itself and a blatant departure from historical nursing Madonnas.

In the summer of 1906 Otto Modersohn joined his wife in Paris. By spring of the following year she was expecting a baby, and the couple returned to Worpswede. Modersohn-Becker died of an embolism at the age of 31, three weeks after their daughter’s birth. Her daughter survived.

During her last years, she painted nude self-portraits — unusual for any artist, but even more unprecedented for a female artist. The most iconic are her nude self-portraits during her pregnancy.

When Modersohn-Becker was alive, recognition was slight, with few exhibits and fewer sales. She was highly prolific in such a short time, producing some 400 paintings and more than a thousand drawings. She recorded her story in letters and diaries, first published a decade after her death.

Paula Modersohn-Becker passed before Die Brücke group was formed, but she was undoubtedly an important precursor of that group and its successor, Der Blaue Reiter. Today she is remembered as a pioneer of modern art in Europe, a woman unafraid to express her creativity and march to her own drum.

Rainer Maria Rilke immortalized her in Requiem for a Friend: “So your gaze was finally free of curiosity and so un-possessive, of such real poverty, it no longer desired self: was sacred.”

Modersohn-Becker's painting, Two Girls in Front of Birch Trees, ca. 1903, is currently on view at the St. Louis Art Museum in gallery 214.

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