German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, born in 1876, is relatively unknown in the United States. This is quite surprising, considering she painted the first nude self-portraits known to have been made by a woman. Many of these audacious portraits capture her own pregnancy—another first among Western women artists, paving the way for later figures like Alice Neel. Modersohn-Becker’s portraits of women spanning all ages—bold in their composition, subtle in their detail, and utterly present—strike a powerful note throughout the first major retrospective of her art in the United States, curated by Jill Lloyd at the Neue Galerie New York, and fittingly titled Ich bin Ich / I Am Me.
In her well-researched book Paula Modersohn-Becker, The First Modern Woman Artist, Diane Radycki notes that the emergence of artists like Frida Kahlo, Cindy Sherman, Ana Mendieta, and Hannah Wilke—whose works interrogate the intersections of sexuality, culture, and tradition—has led to a greater recognition of Modersohn-Becker’s significance as a revolutionary. Radycki highlights two divergent narratives that have shaped perceptions of Modersohn-Becker’s life and work. The 1919 best-seller The Letters and Journals of Paula Modersohn-Becker portrayed her as an idealized figure—a consummate artist, daughter, wife, and mother, seemingly free from personal and artistic turmoil. In contrast, contemporary perspectives reveal her as a fiercely independent woman and an ambitious artist, grappling with profound struggles between her art and family life. “Wifely” she was not. After marrying artist Otto Modersohn in 1901, she traveled alone to Paris in 1903 and 1905, focusing on her art for extended periods. There, she discovered Japanese art, Gauguin, Cézanne, Les Nabis, and, not less critically, Vollard, the celebrated art dealer. Winning his confidence, she became one of an exclusive circle that included luminaries like Gertrude Stein.
In this retrospective, girls on the cusp of adolescence are a central recurrent subject matter. For instance, Modersohn-Becker’s life-size charcoal, colored chalk, and pastel drawings of girl nudes date back to as early as 1899, when she studied figure drawing with Fritz Mackensen, the strict founder of Worpswede, an artist colony outside Bremen, near her family home. There is nothing sweet or idealized about her girl nudes—they are awkward and tender; their postures express specific yet complex attitudes that can read as both compliant and rebellious, oblivious and self-conscious. Their sheer scale makes their presence particularly palpable. They are magnificent and so familiar to us.
Today, it is piquant to note some of the criticism Modersohn-Becker received for these life-size drawings—described as “coarse mischief” and a “miserable lack of ability. They must have been pretty tough to digest in 1899. It is interesting to juxtapose the approaches of some German Expressionist male painters, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who depicted girlhood as a state of alluring sexuality, with those of Modersohn-Becker, whose portrayal of pre-adolescent girls captures a poignant emotional and physical transition state, where identity is in flux.
Motherhood is another central theme in Modersohn-Becker’s paintings. Reclining Mother with Child II is one of the exhibition’s most moving and bold pieces. In her New York Times review (February 25th, 2016), Roberta Smith observes that the work “strains against its academic traces and doesn’t quite break free.” Modersohn-Becker does engage with the tradition of reclining nudes like Manet’s Olympia and Gauguin’s statuesque figures, but she takes us somewhere entirely new from this common starting point. The horizontal figures of mother and child spread on the white bed sheets under the bluish horizon resemble landforms with deep interiority. This imagery captures Motherhood as a force of nature, a psychological state of being, and, in Modersohn-Becker’s case, a premonition.
Mother and infant are both in an embryonic pose, entwined in deep slumber, their bodies flowing one into the other as if in unity. Yet, there is an acute tension—the mother’s arm supports the baby’s head and presses down a fist as if clutching the white blanket beneath them. A sharp, outlined angle forms between the baby’s body and the mother’s hand. While the baby clings to the mother, the right foot seems posed for a step, as if on the verge of separation. Reclining Mother with Child II carries an additional haunting resonance. Modersohn-Becker died at 31 in 1907 from a sudden massive postpartum embolism just eighteen days after giving birth to her first child, Mathilde. She was finally allowed to stand and, eager to return to Paris, uttered, “Wie schade”—what a pity—and then she died. She had foreseen her death from a young age, often painting herself as pregnant, underlining the importance of pregnancy in her life.
During her short career, Modersohn-Becker left behind an astonishing body of work—more than 700 paintings and over 1,000 drawings. She gained recognition through her letters and diaries, especially her correspondence with her close friend, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. The retrospective’s subtitle comes from a 1906 letter to Rilke: “And now I don’t know how to sign my name. I am not Modersohn, and I am not Paula Becker anymore. I am Me, and I hope to become that more and more.” In this retrospective, it is hard not to speculate how this painter, who died young on the brink of Modernism, might have evolved in the 20th century. Yet, the extensive and profound body of work she left behind offers deep satisfaction, highlighting her remarkable achievements as an artist far ahead of her time.
Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich bin Ich / I am Me at the Neue Gallerie Through Septembre 9, 2024