Paula Modersohn-Becker
To honor Women's History Month for the next four Sundays we will present masterpieces created by female artists. Today we start with Paula Modershon-Becker - Enjoy!
She worked at fever pitch, producing 80 pictures in a year, and was dead by 31. Paula Modersohn-Becker was the first woman to paint a naked self-portrait—and while apparently pregnant, at that—in 1906. Regularly described as an Expressionist, her portraits don’t look like anything or anyone else. Her women are crude and exact, glowing with strange colors. She sold three paintings in her lifetime, leaving behind a forest of letters and diaries.
Between 1901 and 1902, Paula Modersohn-Becker gradually moved away from pure landscape painting. First she painted landscapes with figures, then figures in front of a landscape and finally only figures—the people she wanted to portray in “runic script.” They are often represented in close-up. Children were a constant theme. She depicted them at different ages, her interest in portraying them as individuals progressively giving way to an emphasis on the psychological condition of childhood itself. This painting exemplifies the trend in her work towards two-dimensionality of form and color, accompanied by a steadily waning interest in surface texture.
Paula Modersohn-Becker should unmistakably be considered one of the pioneers of European modern art. Read more about her in the article "Paula Modersohn-Becker: The Uknown Expressionist".