Paula Modersohn-Becker
Wonderful Female Painters
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Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907)
Portrait of a Young Woman (ca. 1905)
Paula Modersohn-Becker painted just a few years, but her work is large —about 700 paintings and 1000 drawings— and very valuable at expressing with unique strength her own vision of things. She is considered a precursor of German Expressionism.
n her paintings we can find all the concerns defining the painting of the Modernity: the thick and textured technique of Van Gogh; the forms and simple and solid colors of Gauguin; the Cloisonnism resource that Bernard and Anquetin transmitted to the aforementioned artists. (It consists in compartmentalizing the color zones with a well-defined border, inspired in the stained glass.) We can add the primitivism and the Japanese woodblock prints that fascinated all the painters of the time. Her expressive and symbolic power is to be added to all that.
When she was 25, Paula married to landscapist Otto Modersohn. Her marriage compelled her to share the time between her passion and her new role of wife and step mother. Her husband did not value her work or her career potential and took her away from Paris to the little town where they had met, away from artistic circles.
Some years later, she decided to return to her career, escaped to Paris to dedicate herself to be a painter. And if that was not scandal enough for the beginning of the century, she painted a series of self-portraits being nude and one pregnant. It is not a minor data: she is considered to be the first artist who painted a full-length nude self-portrait.
Her husband finally convinced her to go back to him, and she got pregnant. The following day to giving birth to her daughter, she died She was 31 years old. If it were a fiction, we could say it is an exaggerated story, too symbolic. She is not a much remembered artist, but she should be.
Recommended links:
Wonderful Female Painters: Leonora Carrington.
Wonderful Female Painters: Remedios Varo.
Wonderful Female Painters: Olga Costa.
Wonderful Female Painters: Grandma Moses.
Wonderful Female Painters: Florine Settheimer.
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