Paula Modersohn-Becker
"She hates the conventional and now she is making the mistake of preferring to make everything angular, ugly, strange and wooden. The colour is fantastic, but the form?" wrote Otto Modersohn in 1903 on the works of his wife.
Paula Modersohn-Becker had just returned from Paris when she created this painting. Full of new impressions, she created a work packed with tension between spatiality and surface. The only three-dimensional element is the tree, which stands out against the landscape. The man lying beneath it seems to fuse with his surroundings. It is not surprising that Modersohn-Becker's colleagues in Worpswede (famous for its artists' colony founded in the last decades of the 19th century) reacted with incomprehension.
Paula Modersohn-Becker was a German painter and one of the most important representatives of early Expressionism. Don't forget to check our Archive for her works; they are amazing!
We present today's work thanks to the Städel Museum.
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