An exultant sense of discovery is the propelling through line of “Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich Bin Ich / I Am Me,” a glorious exhibition at the Neue Galerie that is, surprisingly, the German artist’s first in an American museum. (It will travel to the Art Institute of Chicago in October.)
During a career cut short by her death in 1907, when she was only 31, little escaped Modersohn-Becker’s scrutiny. A paramount subject of inquiry was her own self. For some of her 60 self-portraits, which are her best-known works, she bared all: She is said to be the first Western female artist to depict herself in the nude. In many others, she holds a flower or a fruit, like a saint or a nobleman in a Renaissance painting. Either way, she looks unmistakably modern.
Only a generation separates Modersohn-Becker from Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, who shared her predilection for painting mothers and children. But while the Paris-based Impressionists depicted the bourgeois occupants of drawing-rooms, Modersohn-Becker, who visited Paris devotedly, homed in on the primal.
It was on a visit to the Trocadéro ethnographic museum in Paris in 1906 that she discovered, a year before Picasso, the power of African masks. She was also looking at Courbet, Cézanne and Gauguin. All of these influences converge in such paintings as “Kneeling Mother With Child at Her Breast” from 1906, where a dark-skinned, blocky woman suckles a white infant (might Modersohn-Becker be alluding to the nourishment she derives from African art?), and “Reclining Mother with Child II” from the same year, of a nude woman lying on her side in a fetal position nursing a naked baby.
Those were produced near the end of her life. Yet even at the outset, she showed a gift for channeling traditional methods and tropes to suit her sensibility. In 1898 and 1899, while sketching nude models in the way that art students had done for centuries, she also used charcoal to memorialize the farmers, peat diggers and charity cases in Worpswede, the rural village in northern Germany that she inhabited on and off for the rest of her life.
For a decade, Worpswede had nurtured an artist’s colony, and there Modersohn-Becker, raised in an upper-middle-class family in Dresden and Bremen, found comrades who shared her interests, among them the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the sculptor Clara Westhoff (whom Rilke married), and the painter Otto Modersohn, a widower who became her husband.
Unlike most of her painter colleagues in Worpswede, she didn’t romanticize rural life or rural people, capturing them sympathetically but honestly. Flattened noses and receding chins are not prettified. As Rilke wrote of her in 1906, she was “painting things that are very Worpswede-ish and yet no one else has been able to see and paint.”
In her dazzling early charcoal portrait drawings, almost life size, she looked hard at her sitters, rendering roughened knuckles and dirt-encrusted fingernails as lovingly as a court painter did bridles and breeches. She recognized that hands can divulge as much as faces. In “Farmer’s Wife, Seated” (1899), a woman with a thick nose and tendoned neck gazes with a look of composure, a mood that is reinforced by the large, capable, weathered hands resting comfortably in her lap.
Hands are just as expressive in a monumental portrait, “Old Woman From the Poorhouse Sitting in the Garden” (circa 1905). Serene, if understandably wary, the thickset sitter dominates the scene, her striped skirt filling almost half the canvas, while three chickens and a sinuous white horse of the sort painted a few years later by Kandinsky peck and cavort nearby.
Cézanne’s apples, van Gogh’s flowers and Degas’s red interiors all find their way into Modersohn-Becker’s work, as do the grave, staring eyes of Roman Egyptian funerary portraits and the flower-adorned profiles of the early Renaissance master Pisanello. She was voracious, and she incorporated all that she digested.
As suggested in her self-portraits and in a striking 1905 depiction of Clara Rilke-Westhoff, who is seen gingerly holding a thorny rose between her thumb and index finger while uneasily turning her gaze sharply to one side, Modersohn-Becker strained to reconcile the conflict between her fierce artistic ambitions and the more conventional aspirations and duties expected of her by her family. Stepmother to a daughter from Otto Modersohn’s first marriage, she wanted a child of her own but had difficulty conceiving. In what is probably her most famous image, “Self-Portrait on Sixth Wedding (Anniversary) Day” (1906), she is stripped to the waist, her hair fashionably bobbed and a favorite amber necklace hanging from her neck, as she looks at the viewer with a sly smile. Her hands frame a slightly swollen belly.
In truth, she had separated from Modersohn when she made that anniversary painting, which she signed “P.B.,” her initials before she married. And she was not pregnant. Writing to Rilke just before she moved out, planning to settle in Paris, she closed by saying, “I don’t even know how I should sign my name. I’m not Modersohn and I’m not Paula Becker anymore either. I am Me, and I hope to become Me more and more. That is surely the goal of all our struggles.”
But she would return to her husband, in part because she lacked the financial resources to support herself. Eight months later, she became pregnant and, in November 1907, gave birth to a daughter. The delivery was arduous. She never recovered. Less than three weeks afterward, on her first attempt to leave her bed, she suffered a pulmonary embolism and died almost at once.
Nearly all of her work is in Germany, where she is far more celebrated than in this country. (The Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen opened in 1927, the first museum in the world devoted to a woman artist.)
Her achievement is abundantly evident in this overdue show, organized by Jill Lloyd at the Neue Galerie and Jay A. Clarke at the Art Institute of Chicago. Prodigiously talented and sympathetic, Modersohn-Becker achieved something extraordinary in her abbreviated time. Tantalizingly, her greatest work dates from the last two years. What might have been is incalculable.
Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich bin Ich / I Am Me
Through Sept. 9, the Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212-628-6200, neuegalerie.org.
Read More: Illuminating a Trailblazing Artist Who Died Too Young
