HUMLEBÆK.- For many people the German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) will be a new acquaintance, while others may remember her from the well-attended Self-Portrait exhibition at
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 2012, which included four of her paintings. Now there is an opportunity to get to know the artist’s work better, since over the winter Louisiana is showing the first major exhibition of Paula Modersohn-Becker’s work in Scandinavia. The exhibition features 150 works, a good 90 paintings and just under 60 drawings, several in large format, and focuses on the artist’s central genres – figure paintings, portraits and self-portraits. Louisiana has been fortunate enough to borrow a wide range of what are considered her major works. The exhibition thus offers a detailed presentation of the artist’s work, from early sketches to late, thoroughly elaborated paintings.
Paula Modersohn-Becker insisted on her integrity as an artist in a male-dominated artistic milieu around 1900. Today her works still stand out with their unconventional approach to the subjects and their strange, raw beauty. The artist’s short life – she died at the age of 31 – unfolded between Paris and the northern German artist colony in Worpswede near Bremen, where among other things she formed a close friendship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Paula Modersohn-Becker has a status as one of the radical innovators of German modernism and one of the first to introduce impulses from modern French art into German painting. She is also considered the first woman in the history of art to paint full-length nude self-portraits, and not least in this respect she points forward to later and present-day themes in visual art.
The retrospective exhibition combines a thematic and chronological presentation of the works, covering the whole oeuvre, with its short span of just ten years. There are in all 745 registered paintings by the artist and 1200 drawings, most of which are to be found today in private collections and museums in Germany, the source of most of the works borrowed for the exhibition.
The exhibition, being shown in the East Wing of the museum, starts in the Column Hall with a concentrated roomful of the artist’s early and late drawings from both Worpswede and Paris and offers insight into the development of the artist’s work. The drawing was her starting point and is central to her oeuvre from start to finish. The earliest are naturalistic portrait drawings and life studies from Worpswede. They show the artist’s preoccupation with striking physiognomies, and how she did not idealize her models, mainly girls and women, but rather monumentalized them. The drawings from Paula Modersohn-Becker’s stay in Paris have the character of sketches – either drawn ‘snapshots’ from the artist’s movements around the city or life drawings made at the private art schools Académie Colarossi and Julian, where the artist took lessons. In the Column Hall the museum is also showing the artist’s enigmatic painting and principal work Self-Portrait on the Sixth Wedding Day, 1906.
This is followed in the Arcade by a succession of the artist’s self-portraits, hung chronologically. Here, with the artist’s gaze at herself at the centre, you can follow the development of the oeuvre from start to finish – both in the formal experiments and in the artist’s various self-stagings. The development is rounded off with what is presumably the first full-length painted nude self-portrait in the history of art by a female artist. It was painted in 1906 during her last stay in Paris.
In the Arcade is also shown portraits of some of the people who were closest to the artist: her husband, the artist Otto Modersohn, her friend the sculptor Clara Westhoff and not least her close friend the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who married Clara Westhoff. The year after Modersohn-Becker’s death Rilke wrote a poem for her, “Requiem for a Friend”.
In the next galleries a number of the central motifs and themes of the artist’s oeuvre are shown. Paula Modersohn-Becker was first and foremost a figure painter. She painted women and children, including portraits of women from Worpswede, rendered with a respectful, unostentatious realism. Another theme is girls holding flowers in their hands – and in these pictures in particular the symbolist features of the oeuvre become clear. A realism-based symbolism is also evident from a number of paintings showing people, standing among birch trunks and girls hugging animals – for example Girl in a Birch Forest with a Cat, 1904. A number of works depict children in settings of a more ritual character. Formally speaking what we see here is the artist’s inspiration from French Symbolism and Modernism, for example Maurice Denis and Paul Gauguin, with whom she was thoroughly familiar from her time in Paris, as well as inspiration from classical, ancient and Japanese art.
The still life, a central category for the artist, is also included in the exhibition. Here we sense the inspiration from the French painter Paul Cézanne, whose works Modersohn-Becker saw in Paris in 1900. The mother-and-child theme too is central, and the exhibition shows the symbiosis between mother and baby in a pair of large, thoroughly worked paintings where not least the nudity of the mother, as in the work Reclining Mother with Child II, Summer 1906, shifts the motif away from the classic Madonna and Child of art history.
Paula Modersohn Becker was born in 1876 in Dresden and grew up in a relatively well-off, well-educated and culturally open-minded family who backed up her artistic ambitions. At this time women still had no access to the academies of art, and Paula Modersohn-Becker instead trained at private art schools, first in Berlin, later in Paris.
In 1898 she settled down in the northern German village and artist colony Worpswede outside Bremen. There she met her husband, the painter Otto Modersohn, who was one of the founders of the colony. She also met Rainer Maria Rilke, who like herself had been attracted by the creative environment of the colony. From Worpswede she travelled four times to Paris on short and long stays, where she took lessons and studied both classical art and the contemporary modern art in the museums and galleries. She read among others Nietzsche and J.P. Jacobsen with great enthusiasm and pleasure, and – in the spirit of the Vitalist trend of the time – engaged in home gymnastics according to the precepts of the Danish gymnastics instructor J.P. Müller.
She developed her work in parallel with – but without ties to – the German Expressionism that also found its form at the beginning of the century, for example with the founding of the group Die Brücke in 1905. Modersohn-Becker drew inspiration from the German tradition and French modernism, as well as from Egyptian, archaic and Japanese art. In 1907 she died, just 31 years old, eighteen days after the birth of her first child.
A few works by Paula Modersohn-Becker have been shown earlier in Denmark. In 1932 five works were exhibited at Den Frie Udstillingsbygning in Copenhagen at the exhibition Newer German Art. The travelling exhibition was curated by the Nationalgalerie in Berlin and besides Copenhagen was shown in Norway, Sweden and Cologne. The exhibition with just under 200 works by 73 artists, was to “...give expression to the strongest, most characteristic and future-oriented manifestations of modern German art”, as the preface of the catalogue puts it. Modersohn-Becker was exhibited side by side with artists like Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Lyonel Feininger, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka, Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Oskar Schlemmer and others. Apart from the sculptor Emy Roeder, who was represented by one work, Modersohn-Becker was the exhibition’s only woman, and with five works she was as well represented as her male – today better-known – colleagues.
The next year, in 1933, the National Socialists seized power in Germany, and Paula Modersohn-Becker’s work was declared entartet – degenerate. She was included in the big Entartete Kunst exhibition in Munich in 1937. About 70 of her works were confiscated by the authorities from German museums and public collections.
