Artist Paula Modersohn-Becker’s Portraits Were Ahead of Their Time

Her career lasted only a decade, but Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) painted more than 500 canvases, including moody landscapes, wry self-portraits and careful studies of children, old people and the residents of a local poorhouse. She approached even her humblest subjects with a rare respect, says Ingrid Pfeiffer, curator of a new retrospective at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, on view until February. “She gave value to each person she painted,” Pfeiffer says. Yet her intense, unsentimental depictions of rural people held little appeal to art buyers at the end of the Victorian era. Indeed, during her life Modersohn-Becker, whose upper-middle-class Bremen family encouraged her artistic education in London, Berlin and Paris, sold just four paintings. It was only after she died at 31, from complications of childbirth, that her work began to find an audience. Today, she is regarded as a pioneer of the artistic movement that would become known as Expressionism, with a style that was years ahead of her contemporaries. “I am still an incomplete person and should so like to become someone,” she wrote. “Then again, I also feel that whoever thinks of me as incomplete needn’t really bother to look in my direction.”   

Amy Crawford | | READ MORE

Amy Crawford is a Michigan-based freelance journalist writing about cities, science, the environment, art and education. A longtime Smithsonian contributor, her work also appears in CityLab and the Boston Globe.