Paula Modersohn-Becker

By Emma Cormier

Have you ever heard of Paula Modersohn-Becker? I didn’t think so; after all, she was a woman...

When I started the research for this column on Paula Modersohn-Becker, I did what any good student would do and found myself a book dedicated to her in the library. The book seemed promising, with many examples of her work and an in-depth analysis of the different themes that she tackled during her artistic career. But the more I was reading about her life, the more I realized something. In the book, the majority of her techniques are credited to a male artist before her. Her color work is credited to Gauguin, her angularity to Cézanne and possibly Picasso, and her gradation of lights and shadows to Courtois. It is not to say that she did not get inspiration from them, but how is it so that men artists are geniuses, and women artists are simply inspired? Why can she not be praised for her work without her credit being attributed to someone else? It is like saying ‘Yes, she was great, but it was because she got inspiration from those other artists’.   

So, for this column and the depiction of her life, I’m afraid there will be none of that. Women artists and women in general deserve to be celebrated fully for their achievements, which ultimately belong to them and no one else.  

Moreover, I must mention that while this column is written from a fairly feminist point of view, Paula was in no way a feminist. She did not see her struggles with being an artist as relating to her gender but rather as something relating to her as a person. She often said and wrote that she felt the feminist movement, which was slowly rising in Germany at that time, was too aggressive towards men. What this means is that we should not see her work as vindictive or political, but rather as a reflection of her personal struggles and questionings. 

Paula Modersohn-Becker was born in 1976 in Germany to a railway engineer father and aristocratic mother. The third of seven children, she was always exposed to cultural and intellectual activities growing up and started to live as an artist when she was 16. After graduating from a six-week drawing and painting course in Berlin, she was offered a place at the Berlin School of Arts for Women. There she was subject to the rigid academic teachings of 19th century Germany, with an intense focus on drawing classes. Paula persisted and was a very good student, taking her classes very seriously and conformed to what was expected of her. But when she visited the artist colony of Worpswede in 1897 while on holiday, all of that changed. A village north of Breme, Worpswede had become a small hub for German artists who wished to protest against the rigidity of schooling. You can imagine Paula’s shock, coming from a strict academic background, when she arrived in this place where there were no rules and no constraints. Nonetheless, their freedom did not scare her, and she decided to move there permanently in 1898.

The Worpswede colony was a great environment for female artists, who were almost seen and treated as equals to their male peers (emphasis on almost). They had independence and freedom and even their own studios (can you imagine?!). There, Paula was able to take advantage of the countryside surrounding her to paint landscapes and get villagers to pose for her portraits. 

But Paula also found love in Worpswede, in the form of Otto Modersohn. An avid diary-writer, she wrote about him, even before they were close, that ‘Through his paintings, he is already dear to me’. Yeah....infatuated much? They became close friends after Otto’s wife died in 1900, leaving him with an infant, and eventually got married in 1901.

Although it was a marriage of love, it did also allow Paula to become financially independent from her parents who had supported her until that point. But things did not exactly go as planned. Paula had to now be a wife and a stepmother, meaning that she had to balance her artistic career with motherhood. This was not what she had wanted, and she soon felt as though she was losing herself. As a result, just 5 years after they got married, Paula decided that she wanted more for herself and moved to Paris to continue her artistic career.  

In Paris Paula Modersohn-Becker attended the Académie Cola Rossi until 1905, and then the Académie Julian. There she was once again attending a lot of nude drawing classes, particularly female nudes. With Paris being the European artistic center of that time, she also spent a lot of her time in museums and became more acquainted with antique, Gothic, and Egyptian art, notably at the Louvre. She also met Rodin and Gauguin, which inspired her to include more colors in her artwork. Paula thrived in Paris, where she was away from her domestic responsibilities as a wife and a stepmother and, was able to do whatever she pleased whenever she pleased. Despite this, she did eventually return to her husband in 1907, and gave birth to her daughter Mathilde. She unfortunately passed away due to labor complications at the age of 31.   

Aside from her far-from-common life, why is Paula Modersohn-Becker artistically relevant and iconic?   

Firstly because of who she painted. Paula Modersohn-Becker spent most of her artistic career painting women and mothers, but also self-portraits. And she did not only paint women; she painted female nudes. At a time when the female body was still very taboo, it was often painted as a sexual object or as a performer for the viewer. But Paula Modersohn-Becker went above that and painted the female body as it is and as it exists. Many of her female portraits harbor uncomfortable dimensions and unpleasant expressions. Paula was not scared of what most people called ‘flaws’, and often accentuated them because she felt as though it revealed the personality of the model better. She was interested in revealing the truth instead of simply skimming the surface of the physical appearance.  

This search for the truth was what drove her to paint so many self-portraits, a lot of them nude. Throughout her life, she tried to understand herself and find happiness and laying herself bare on the canvas was one way for her to conduct that search. So, she painted herself over and over again, sometimes as she was and sometimes as she would or could be. We can look at Self-Portrait on the Sixth Wedding Anniversary, where she painted herself naked from the waist up and held her pregnant stomach. At the time when she painted this, she was not pregnant; we can see a clear blur between reality, imagination, or even foreshadowing. In her later portraits and self-portraits, we often find the presence of fruits, a sign of fertility. This could easily be seen as a representation of her inner turmoil when it came to motherhood. As mentioned, she had not been comfortable in her role of stepmother, and she often worried about what motherhood would do to her career. We must remember that as independent and rebellious as she was, Paula was still expected to have children by both her family and society.  

But her battle with the idea of motherhood did not take anything away from her admiration for mothers in general (she was a girl's girl). She painted portraits of many mothers. We can think of Mother with a Child on Her Arm, in which a mother is standing, nude from the waist up, holding her child on her arm and some fruit in the other hand. What is captivating about this painting is the overtaking dimensions of the mother and her exhausted expression. The mother is taking up space in the canvas, and when we look at it, we can almost feel her exhaustion radiating off her. All we want to do is reach out to her and tell her to get some rest.  

As a woman myself, looking at Paula’s paintings feels like taking a huge breath. I often find a knot forming in my stomach when looking at the way women are depicted by other artists, but with Paula’s paintings, it feels like a huge weight drops off my shoulders. In her paintings, it does not feel like the women are there to perform or win the affection of the viewer. On the contrary, we can feel that they are there to be as they are and as they exist, and that Paula did not want to change or modify them in any way. She wanted to give her subjects space and importance instead of trying to mold them to the viewer’s liking.  

To conclude, Paula Modersohn-Becker was a highly modern and ahead-of-her-time artist and woman. Throughout her life, she did as she pleased, never conforming to society’s expectations of her, taking the lead in her career and life. This independence translates into her art, which is mostly composed of portraits of women, mothers, and self-portraits. Far from staying within the lines of the aesthetically pleasing, Paula sought to depict the inner life of her models and was never scared to paint their ‘unaesthetically pleasing’ sides. Although she was not herself a feminist, her work on women is a huge contribution to art history, offering us a first glance into the rarely revealed female gaze of the 19th century. So, thank you Paula Modersohn-Becker.