Paula Modersohn-Becker
Paula Modersohn-Becker was a German Expressionist painter of the late 19th and early 20th century. Her work is noted for its intensity and its blunt, unapologetic humanity, and for the many self-portraits the artist produced, including nude self-portraits. Few women artists have produced as many self-portraits as Modersohn-Becker. Despite the brevity of her life, around 50 such paintings and drawings survive.
She painted this Self-Portrait With a Hat and Veil during her visit to Paris in 1906. Egyptian mummy portraits were a major source of inspiration for it. These mummy portraits had been discovered in the 1880s in the Fayum oasis and she saw reproductions of them on show in Paris in 1903. She was struck by their size and simplicity: "Forehead, eyes, mouth, nose, cheeks, chin, that is all (…) How simply the planes of such an ancient mouth are recorded.” The close-cropping of the sometimes Proto-Cubist portraits produced in the summer of 1906 may suggest intimacy but, despite this close-up effect, the images convey a considerable emotional distance and dissociation.
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