NEW YORK, NY.- Neue Galerie New York is presenting “Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich bin Ich / I Am Me”. Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) is a major figure in the history of German Expressionism, yet despite her importance to art history, Modersohn-Becker’s work has never before been the subject of a museum retrospective in the United States. While her paintings and drawings have appeared in group shows at museums and galleries, and there is even a Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in her hometown of Bremen, “Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich bin Ich / I Am Me,” organized by Neue Galerie New York and the Art Institute of Chicago, marks the first full-scale presentation devoted to the artist in this country.

In the course of her brief career – which was cut short at the young age of 31 because of a postpartum embolism – Modersohn-Becker produced more than 700 paintings and over 1,000 drawings. She is acclaimed for the many self-portraits she created, including the first nude self-portraits known to have been made by a woman. Many of these works focused on her pregnancy, another first among Western women artists. The artist first became known in part through her letters and diaries, including correspondence with her close friend, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In 1906 Modersohn-Becker wrote the following 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 hope to become that more and more." (Und nun weiss ich gar nicht, wie ich mich unterschreiben soll. Ich bin nicht Modersohn und ich bin auch nicht mehr Paula Becker, Ich bin Ich, und hoffe es immer mehr zu werden.)"

This landmark statement of self-determination—Ich bin Ich (I am Me)—provides the sub-title for this exhibition, and a window into the artist’s formidable sense of identity. “Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich bin Ich / I am Me” is the first collaboration between Neue Galerie New York and the Art Institute of Chicago, to which the exhibition will travel following its debut at the Neue Galerie. This exhibition is curated by Jill Lloyd at Neue Galerie New York and by Jay Clarke at the Art Institute of Chicago.

DRAWINGS AND PRINTS

Paula Modersohn-Becker saw drawing as an essential part of her practice – she produced nearly 1,400 sheets. The artist became focused on drawing at the age of sixteen while visiting her aunt Marie Hill in London. By 1898, she had completed her formal artistic training and embarked on a career as an independent artist, yet her drawing education never ceased. Just prior to her death in 1907, Modersohn-Becker continued to take drawing classes to hone her skills. Modersohn-Becker’s mature drawing style may be divided into two types: medium- to large-scale, finished portrait or figure drawings generally done in charcoal and smaller, sketchy compositional studies in charcoal and, to a lesser extent, graphite. Throughout her career, Modersohn-Becker made drawings to investigate figural pairings or multifigural compositions. These studies were executed on smaller sheets of paper, about 25 x 30 cm (9 7⁄8 x 11 3⁄4 in.), usually ivory but occasionally blue, and either horizontal or vertical in orientation. Mainly studies for figure placement or compositional structure, they were created with a minimum of media on the page. The artist seemed uninterested in facial, costume, or landscape details; rather she was thinking on the page, using drawing as a means of contemplation.

LANDSCAPES

Landscapes are an important aspect of Paula Modersohn-Becker’s oeuvre but they have been largely overshadowed by the emphasis on her figural work. The most unusual and characteristic of her landscapes are Modersohn-Becker’s close-up paintings of birch trees. Requiring constant irrigation and symbolic of renewal and purity in German and Celtic culture partly because of their white bark, this species of tree was plentiful in the moors around Worpswede, which was dotted with canals. In her landscapes, the artist often depicted children, usually small girls, playing with goats and sheep in meadows and forests, manifesting their communion with nature. Sheep in the Birch Forest (1903) incorporates grazing livestock amid its spindly trunks. The sheep are not delineated but presented as vague shapes, beige and pink forms tilting toward the earth. Not only did the sheep serve as food for the inhabitants of the area, but their wool was used for knitting clothing and weaving tapestries.

CHILDREN

Almost one-third of Modersohn-Becker’s drawn and painted output features children. Unlike the work of her peers, such as Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, who tended to depict babies and children in bourgeois interiors, Modersohn-Becker portrayed them nude, in natural environments, in close-up portraits devoid of settings, or as symbolic child idols. Her approach to these young subjects is respectful, inquiring, and reverential. Throughout her career, Modersohn-Becker used (generally female) children as models, both in the studio and outdoors. These young women, not yet working in the fields, were likely convenient and willing subjects. Between 1904 and 1905, Modersohn-Becker painted a group of important oils that depict young women in a forest setting. While this was not an uncommon subject at the time, the artist created a genre that was entirely her own. As her friend and fellow student in Worpswede, Ottilie Reyelaender-Böhme, later recalled, Modersohn- Becker depicted the Worpswede villagers “free of any sentimentality.” In Girl Blowing a Flute in the Birch Forest (1905) and Girl in a Red Dress at a Birch Tree Trunk (ca. 1905), the largely vertical formats echo the orientation of the trees; coupled with the high horizon line, they give the appearance of the girls growing from the same root system. Girl with a Baby among Birch Trees, executed in thickly applied oil paint, mixed with tempera and wax, frames the pair with arched birches on either side.

Among the last important series of child pictures she painted are the so-called child idols. Although many of her images of children are small in scale, the “child idols” are larger, suggesting their importance for the artist. In these works, a nude young woman or pair of young women are centrally placed, often raised on a dais of some sort and crowned with flowers, holding fruits, plants, or flowers. Paul Gauguin’s similarly iconic images of Tahitian women from the 1890s, which Modersohn-Becker encountered in Paris exhibitions and private collections in 1905 and 1906, have been seen as precursors to the child idols. While the two artists’ works share affinities in their static and quasi-religious nature, the exoticism and eroticism of Gauguin’s Tahitian canvases are worlds apart from the near-pious simplicity of Modersohn-Becker’s Worpswede child idols. As these were among the last works she made prior to her death in 1907, it is tempting to speculate whether Modersohn-Becker would have continued pursuing this symbolic direction.

PORTRAITS

Paula Modersohn-Becker is primarily a figure painter, and portraiture is one aspect of this central concern. Although she depicted recognizable models, her named sitters are relatively few. Focusing on her family and intimate circle of friends, these portraits have a commemorative dimension, as if the artist wished to preserve the image of the people most important to her for all time. Her early portrait drawings of models from the Worpswede poorhouse are, despite their anonymity, extremely detailed, skillful records of individual people.

Modersohn-Becker’s encounter with Roman-Egyptian funerary portraits in 1903 caused her to reflect upon the qualities she strove for in her own work. Her portraits of her friends, the sculptor Clara Rilke-Westhoff and poet Rainer Maria Rilke, testify to the inspiration Modersohn-Becker drew from antique portraiture. The Rilke couple and Modersohn-Becker shared a deep, creative relationship. Modersohn-Becker’s Portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke (1906) is painted in a small format and displays a more radically abstracted style. The subtle colors, matte surface, and extreme simplification, all relate to Fayum portraiture, while the poet’s beard recalls the abstracted beards sported by Egyptian Pharaohs on ceremonial occasions. Although Modersohn-Becker and Rilke re-established their friendship in 1906, this detail is possibly a reference to his “rule” over his wife. In her portraits of the Rilke couple, Modersohn-Becker created timeless, enduring images of her sitters while nevertheless conveying a vivid sense of their individual presence and circumstances.

SELF-PORTRAITS

Paula Modersohn-Becker’s self-portraits are neither narcissistic nor attempts to stake her claim in a public art world. They were unexhibited during her lifetime, and aimed, if at all, at a future rather than contemporary audience. She appears as an artist only once, in an early self-portrait where she is holding an inconspicuous paint brush. The majority of the self-portraits are situated against blank, coloured backgrounds, occasionally broken by vertical lines or patterns. This is a development associated, like the tall, narrow, formats and simplified, frontal compositions, with Modersohn-Becker’s encounter in 1903 with Roman-Egyptian mummy portraits in the Louvre.

Modersohn-Becker’s nude self-portraits also fly defiantly in the face of her times. Based on nude photographs of the artist, Self-Portrait as Standing Nude with Hat (1906) and the monumental Self-Portrait as Standing Nude (1906) erase or blur the artist’s features, suppressing her identity. On the contrary, Self-Portrait on Sixth Wedding (Anniversary) Day (1906), thought to be the first known self-portrait of a woman artist nude, is a bold self-affirmation. Signed with the initials of her maiden name, Paula Becker, the inscription attests that the ambitious image was painted on the sixth anniversary of her wedding day when she was thirty years old. Separated from her husband at the time and relishing her independence, it is unlikely that the painting simply expresses her personal desire for motherhood. Painted some eight months before she became pregnant, it presents the artist as a creative vessel, “self-confident, powerful and feminine.” Boldly attacking every taboo of her age, the painting reimagines religious and mythical precursors revering womanhood in a daring self-image that celebrates the double potency of women, capable as they are both of childbirth and artistic creation. In Self-Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand (1907), painted when Modersohn-Becker was actually pregnant one year later, the artist rests one hand on the child inside her. In the other she holds two red roses: symbols of her dual creativity.

STILL-LIFES

At the turn of the twentieth century, still-life painting was judged to be lower in the accepted hierarchy of genres. Because of their inherently domestic nature, still-life and floral compositions were seen as the province of women artists. European art academies had a long-established hierarchy, which, in descending order, ranked historical or religious subject matter, portraits, and landscapes ahead of floral works. But this grading was slowly being dismantled as contemporary artists, primarily the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, were drawn to still-life painting as an embodiment of modern life. While in Berlin and Paris from 1898 to 1906, Paula Modersohn-Becker was able to view the revolutionary still-lifes of artists such as Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin on her visits to exhibitions, private collections, and art galleries. Late in her short career, Modersohn-Becker made still-life an important aspect of her oeuvre. She painted about fifty of her seventy-five still-lifes between 1905 and 1907, after she had reached artistic maturity and developed the basis of her formal approach.

NUDES

Paula Modersohn-Becker belonged to the first generation of women artists who gained access to life drawing classes, and the majority of her nudes are works on paper executed in the private art academies she attended in Berlin and Paris. Under Fritz Mackensen’s tutelage in Worpswede, Modersohn-Becker also produced detailed, life-size drawings of nude children and women. With unusual frankness, she depicted angular adolescent girls and the workworn bodies of women whom she enrolled as models from the poorhouse. A rare nude painting from this period, Seated Girl Nude, Her Legs Pulled Up (ca.1904) shows how she developed an expressive body language. In comparison, for example, to Edvard Munch’s renowned Puberty (1894–95) there is no sense of prurient interest on the artist’s part, nor intimations of awakening sexuality. Instead, the young girl appears vulnerable and awkward in her state of undress, pulling her knees towards her and looking glumly at the viewer. The only nude painting Modersohn-Becker produced within the conventional boundaries of the genre shows a woman asleep, her statuesque body spread across the picture plane.