Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich bin Ich / I am Me at the Neue Gallerie

A room with art on the wall

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Installation views of “Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich bin Ich / I Am Me” at Neue Galerie New York. Photography by Annie Schlechter, courtesy Neue Galerie New York

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.

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Alexander Rutsch, The Voluptuous Eye at Kenise Barnes Fine Art


Sunset, mixed media on board, 36 x 44 inches, 1990s

My first encounter with the work of the artist Alexander Rutsch was through his daughter, the artist Alexandra Rutsch Brock (Alexi), a friend and one of my fellow co-founders of the London Calling Collective. I visited the Rutsch family home in Pelham where she grew up and where her mother still lives. The home, an eccentric, polymathic cacophony of hand-hewn art and embodied life, reflects my experience of Alexi as a passionate and energetic artist, teacher, and friend. A labyrinthine artist’s house- the type that real estate brokers abhor, is brim-full of paintings, sculptures, built-in furniture, object d’art, hand-tiled stone walls, curved nooks, hallways to a warren of rooms, and Alexander Rutsch’s overflowing attic studio, where the work from this exhibition came. I marvel at the fecundity of imagination a childhood in that house must have fostered. This history makes it a special honor to step back and review the exhibition, Alexander Rutsch, a Pop-Up, at Kenise Barnes Fine Art in Larchmont, NY, on view March 4-7 and March 11-14. 2021. The exhibition includes paintings on panel, works on paper, sketchbook pages, and whimsical bronze sculptures cast from industrial materials and found objects.

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