Paula Modersohn-Becker

She was an outsider everywhere she went: in bourgeois Bremen, in provincial Worpswede, and in cosmopolitan Paris. When Paula Modersohn-Becker passed away in 1907 at the age of 31, nobody had a sense of how ground-breaking and revolutionary her oeuvre was. Today, she is considered one of the most important representatives of early Expressionism and is one of Germany’s most famous woman painters.

Modersohn-Becker’s unwavering, often inconsiderate drive to create art combined with her self-doubts, her tragic early death after the birth of her child, her tendency to flee Worpswede for Paris, and her complicated marriage to Otto Modersohn, much of which is documented in her often garrulous diaries and letters: all this contributed to the myth that emerged around her and sometimes distorted the perception of her paintings. Boris von Brauchtisch looks at the life and work of the artist in an unbiased fashion, staying close to the sources: personal, critical, caught up in the tendencies of the epoch, moving between Impressionism and Expressionism, between Nietzsche and Rilke, between feminism and nationalism. Of course, one of the key focal points is the artists’ community in Worpswede: looking at what the artists had in common, at their friendships and rivalries, their mutual support of one another, but also their feelings of contempt and resentment. And he poses the fascinating and speculative question: What would have become of her had she lived another 50 years?