Paula Modersohn-Becker

(Germany, 08/02/1876 - 20/11/1907)

Self-Portrait (Semi-Nude with Amber Necklace and Flowers II), (1906)

One of the first women to work with the nude female form, Modersohn-Becker's paintings challenge narratives that construct female identity through nature and that view women as being controlled by emotions, sexual instincts and biology.

Her work most clearly reveals the clash between modernist ideology and social reality. Caught between the artistic and social conservatism of the Worpswede painters and the influence of French modernism, she spent much of her artistic career struggling to visualise both poles of her experience.

Like the remainder of the Worpswede colony, she embraced nature, the primitive simplicity of peasant life and the purity of youth, although didn’t share the groups disdain for historical art and academic training; the flattened and simplified forms that denote her mature style are influenced by the French painters she encountered while living in Paris where she escaped the narrow environment in which her fellow painters had taken very little notice of her work.

Throughout her short life, she painted thirty self-portraits including several nudes which are the first of their kind to be created by a woman, as such, they exemplify the inherent contradictions in the woman artist’s attempt to insert herself into established artistic conventions. Nevertheless, she ignored conventional perspective and anecdotal detail to produce monumental images of idealised femininity and motherhood.

“A great simplicity of form is something marvelous” she wrote in her journal in 1899. The thesis of her oeuvre, she spent her career attempting to simplify the human form to the greatest extent possible.

Image: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait (Semi-Nude with Amber Necklace and Flowers II), (1906). Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen, Germany.