This exhibition catalog considers the work of a pioneering artist who subverted conventions in her bold depictions of the nude, self-portraits, and still-lifes. An iconoclast in her own time, Modersohn-Becker is today considered an icon of modernity.
Throughout her career, Paula Modersohn-Becker boldly experimented with styles while steadfastly pursuing the truth of everyday life and her own female experience. This monograph looks at the entire spectrum of her work—figure drawings, still-lifes, self-portraiture, landscape, nudes, and portraits of young girls and old women—to illustrate the evolution of an artist reacting to seismic cultural change at the turn of the nineteenth century. Whether she was embracing or subverting the principles of realism, naturalism, impressionism, symbolism, or expressionism, Modersohn-Becker remained interested in issues of identity, peeling away outer layers to uncover what she understood as the true essence of life. This book features numerous examples of Modersohn-Becker’s striking and relatively unknown drawings of men, women, and children facing poverty, as well as her highly original figure paintings and nudes—including her unprecedented nude self-portraits. Accompanying the first museum exhibition of Modersohn-Becker’s work in the United States, it reveals the deeply personal and authentic work of an artist who resolutely forged her own path.