Paula Modersohn-Becker

No other woman artist of the classical modern period in Germany has achieved such legendary status in the public eye as Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907). In a comprehensive retrospective the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is presenting a current view of the multifaceted oeuvre of this early representative of the avant-garde. The exhibition brings together 116 of Paula Modersohn-Becker’s paintings and drawings from all creative phases, including major works that are now considered icons of art history.

“Paula Modersohn-Becker continues to fascinate to this day. While some appreciate her as a popular painter of portraits of children, mothers, and farmers, as well of northern German landscapes, others celebrate her as an exceptional modernist artist and place her alongside Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso. It is precisely this polyphonic reception that prompted the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt to invite our audience to take a new look at her work in its entirety in Frankfurt am Main,” explains Philipp Demandt, Director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.

From 1898 onwards, Paula Modersohn-Becker lived in the artists’ colony in Worpswede, interrupted by four longer stays in Paris. Despite the lack of female role models and while married to the Worpswede-based landscape painter Otto Modersohn, she pursued her independent artistic development with great discipline. Her works were created in often solitary confrontation with older art history and current artistic trends, which she studied in the French metropolis. In large series of works, she circled around a recurring repertoire of pictorial motifs. In particular, her self-portraits are one of her most important fields of artistic experimentation. This group of works, is highly diverse—both painterly and stylistically—thus reflecting her entire development as an artist and serving as an ongoing act of artistic self-assurance. Further central work complexes include portraits of children, depictions of mothers and their children, peasants, nudes, and landscapes from Worpswede and Paris, as well as still lifes.

Ingrid Pfeiffer, curator of the exhibition, emphasizes: “Paula Modersohn-Becker’s astonishing oeuvre, which was created in just under ten years of her short life, seems like a burning lens directed at the formal and thematic debates of her time, especially at the art of a female painter in an extremely difficult era for women. Time and again, one is surprised by her artistic independence and her courage to paint motifs that were practically impossible to exhibit, because they would have overwhelmed her environment.”

With her extraordinary painting style and artistic methods, the artist resolutely defied the social and artistic conventions of her time and anticipated key trends of modernism. Paula Modersohn-Becker’s works are rigorous and at times radically different from those of her contemporaries: timeless, universally resonant and independent.

The exhibition Paula Modersohn-Becker is generously supported by the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne and the Dr. Marschner Foundation.

A catalog edited by Ingrid Pfeiffer has been published in an English and German edition with a preface by Philipp Demandt, and essays by Simone Ewald, Anna Havemann, Inge Herold, Ingrid Pfeiffer, Karin Schick, Rainer Stamm, and Wolfgang Werner. All works are reproduced in colour.

Director: Philipp Demandt
Curator: Ingrid Pfeiffer
Press contact: Julia Bastian (Interim Head of Press/Public Relations):
presse@schirn.de / T +49 (0) 69 29 98 82 148
Press material: schirn.de/en (texts, images, and films for download under PRESS)