Art Review: Paula Modersohn-Becker and Her Thwarted Ambitions

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An exhibition of Paula Modersohn-Becker’s art is almost by definition a bittersweet event. It’s thrilling to watch this pioneering German painter restlessly experiment with color and surface in the form of portraits, landscapes, still lifes and scenes of peasant women and children she made during her short time on earth. It’s sad to wonder what she might have done had she lived longer. So it is with “Paula Modersohn-Becker: Art and Life,” a riveting exhibition at Galerie St. Etienne, the keeper of her flame in this country.

Modersohn-Becker died in November 1907, 18 days after giving birth to her daughter, Mathilde. She was 31, her artistic achievement at once stunning and unfulfilled. Still, having realized early that she was an artist and having worked with notable discipline since she was a teenager, she left an exceptionally large body of work, including more than 700 paintings.

It had been regularly jolted forward by sojourns in Paris — four between January 1900 and March 1907. There she absorbed all she could of old and new art. She made strikingly simple drawings of ancient Egyptian sculpture and Fayum mummy portraits at the Louvre that reflected her love of distillation, while discovering modern painting in works by van Gogh, Gauguin, Henri Rousseau, Cézanne and finally Picasso in galleries and annual salons. Through her friend the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, she met Rodin and found his drawings inspiring.

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Barring a big museum loan show, you can see Modersohn-Becker at her very best only in Germany and specifically in Bremen, where a museum is devoted to her art. But the St. Etienne show — with just over 40 paintings, drawings and etchings from 1897 to 1906 — affirms Modersohn-Becker as “The First Modern Woman Artist,” which is the subtitle of Diane Radycki’s compelling 2013 monograph on her life and work.

Born in 1876 to a comfortably middle-class family in Dresden, Modersohn-Becker seems to have always been determined to be somebody. Her father, a railroad engineer, moved the family to Bremen when she was 12. Her parents encouraged her artistic gifts.

She had an innate feeling for the human body as an expressive form that was first sharpened by spending six months in London when she was 16, living with an aunt and studying drawing. She connected similarly to oil paint and was unafraid of ugliness. In fact, achieving it was one of her goals, reflected in her earthy palette and the way she attacked her surfaces with the back end of a brush. Her roughness would later unsettle her husband, the painter Otto Modersohn, and ultimately their marriage.

They married in 1901 in Worpswede on the moors near Bremen, where Otto, who was 11 years her senior, and some other landscape painters had founded an artists’ colony. But Otto was soon put off by Paula’s unswerving dedication to painting and her attraction to the latest Parisian art styles, while Paula found her husband to be much more conservative than she had thought. In early 1906 she fled to Paris, but Otto followed her and they reconciled. When they returned to Worpswede in March 1907, she was pregnant. She had put off having children, but never doubted that she would.

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Modersohn-Becker’s ambition might have been called masculine in earlier times. Going by the number of self-portraits she painted, she certainly had a healthy ego (which Otto complained about). The grave demeanor and large dark eyes of Coptic portraits are especially evident in her self-portraits and paintings of her sister Herma. It is thought that she is the first woman to paint a full-length nude self-portrait and also to paint herself pregnant, and nude, which she did twice — before she was actually expecting.

The exhibition contains one of her largest paintings, “Reclining Female Nude” of 1905-06, depicting an earth-mother type who is at once chaste, sensuous and strong, rendered in heavy textures that the artist inexplicably called “runes.” The work strains against its academic traces and doesn’t quite break free, but its combination of scale, rendering and surface tension is imposing, almost sculptural. It belongs to a history of reclining nudes that reaches from Titian through Manet’s “Olympia” to Matisse’s “Blue Nude,” painted the next year, and exploded in Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” also of 1907.

Presaging artists like Nicole Eisenman and Dana Schutz, Modersohn-Becker painted from a female, implicitly feminist point of view, granting women and also children a memorable emotional complexity through the physicality of her paint and the solidity of her forms. She often painted them out in the open, alone with the birch trees of Worpswede, at liberty, without sentimentality. Her scratched, patchy paint surfaces make her subjects engaging as forms, evoking a gritty realism within a kind of timelessness. Prime examples here include “Child Seated by a Birch Tree” and “Two Girls Sitting in a Landscape,” both from 1905, and the etching “Two Peasant Girls,” from 1902. In three paintings from 1901, she turns lone birch trunks, seen up close, into expressive figural presences.

Modersohn-Becker is often considered, with Lovis Corinth and Käthe Kollwitz, to be a precursor of German Expressionism. But she also channels a kind of plain-spoken monumentality that evokes Breugel. At the end, her figures become increasingly chiseled, even angular, almost anticipating early Cubism. We can only imagine the effects of encountering that style on the future trips to Paris that Otto promised when they reconciled. She might have become one of those great outliers like Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich or Marsden Hartley — born, like her, in the 1870s — who all adapted Cubism to their own divergent purposes. As would Hartley a decade later, and Max Beckmann still later, she was already merging strands of French and German modernism.

We’re left to compare and contrast and to speculate, as did an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bremen that began in 2007, titled “Paula Modersohn-Becker and Art in Paris Around 1900.” And on page 150 of Ms. Radycki’s biography, Modersohn-Becker’s sturdy, knowing self-portrait of 1906 faces a remarkably similar one Picasso painted of himself the same year. It holds its own, and not just because both artists are stripped to the waist.