Find all the information you need—plus helpful tips—to plan your visit Explore the works in our collection and delve deeper into their stories Join us for a wide range of programs—there's something for visitors of all ages When Paula Modersohn-Becker decided to become an artist in 1890s Germany she embarked on a journey of intense self-discovery that resonates with our own 21st-century search for the authentic self By <a href="https://www.artic.edu/authors/54/jay-a-clarke" rel="author">Jay A This journey would take her across three locations that profoundly shaped her artistic life: Germany’s capital a rural artist colony and farming community in Northern Germany; and Paris they served chiefly as places of inner inspiration as she strove to realize her full potential Her production would transform from student work in Berlin to her first artistically mature drawings and paintings in idyllic Worpswede and continue with her deepening painting practice in Paris where she experienced both creative triumph and personal change she would produce over 2,000 paintings and works on paper developing an innovative personal style that would cement her future place as one of Germany’s most revered artists Modersohn-Becker took her first drawing lessons in London in 1892 and continued studying in her hometown of Bremen between 1893 and 1896 before moving to Berlin to pursue full-time artistic training Women were denied entrance to Germany’s state-run art schools until 1919 but with the financial support of extended family and an unexpected inheritance Modersohn-Becker embarked on two years of study at the Association for Women Artists a well-respected school in the center of Berlin open to both amateurs and professionals she embraced drawing as an essential part of her practice she described the challenging nature of her drawing instruction: “I’m still battling my material with great difficulty I find this casual use of charcoal terribly difficult.” Yet she persevered “I’m drawing as much as I can every day.” Modersohn-Becker’s portrait and figure drawings produced over the course of her studies in Berlin manifest a deepening understanding of physiognomy and the human form For example Standing Male Nude with Bowed Head Leaning against the Wall is infused with dramatic light and shade; defined if blocky muscles; and a practiced handling of charcoal and crayon Paula Modersohn-BeckerPaula-Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung The artist’s drawing and disposition became more confident in 1897 thanks to the guidance of her most influential instructor in Berlin the Swedish-German painter Jeanna Bauck (1840–1926) and refreshingly uninterested in her appearance She wrote her parents that Bauck hoped to awaken in her students an “artistic vision … on a higher plane and infinitely more difficult to acquire.” I want to go further and further; I can hardly wait until I’m a real artist Modersohn-Becker approached her work more intensively stressing to her father: “I believe that if I am ever to get anywhere I have to devote everything I have to it.” The progress she made is evident in Seated Female Nude where she confidently depicts a female model in dark strokes of charcoal creating the highlights of her form by rubbing Paula Modersohn-BeckerThe Cleveland Museum of Art Modersohn-Becker frequently visited exhibitions of contemporary art in the prominent galleries of Schulte and Keller & Reiner and studied ancient and modern art in Berlin’s many museums Among the contemporary works she mentioned in her diaries were those by the Hungarian József Rippl-Rónai; the Germans Max Liebermann and Walter Leistikow; and the Norwegian Edvard Munch Modersohn-Becker moved from Berlin to Worpswede a village 18 miles northeast of Bremen that would become an intermittent home until her death in 1907 she described the town in lyrical terms: “Worpswede a land of gods.” Established in the 13th century difficult to farm but filled with wetland useful for grazing livestock the region’s farmers found a way to earn a living by digging peat and shipping it to Bremen through a series of canals She speaks the language of these people [in Worpswede] listens to stories about their hardships and their deaths and dances with the father of the bride at poor people’s weddings Modersohn-Becker made a group of around 50 large-scale figure drawings and bust-length portraits placed in unspecified settings their faces detailed and backgrounds only suggested in heavily worked charcoal She chose the impoverished villagers as her models primarily young girls and the elderly from the local poorhouse the only individuals available because they were not at work in the fields The force of these intensely rendered drawings derives not only from their superb handling but also from the way in which they capture the truth and vulnerability of their sitters Whereas many of her contemporaries depicted the habitants of Worpswede generically and unsympathetically Modersohn-Becker represented them with precision and connected to them deeply Seated Old Woman with Hands Folded in Her Lap The most unusual and characteristic of Modersohn-Becker’s landscapes are her close-up paintings of birch trees She personified the delicate trunks as slender devout girls who pray for happiness but accept their sadness Their bare branches stretched out to the sky Modersohn-Becker painted a group of important oils that depict young women in a forest setting While this was not an uncommon subject at the time the artist created a genre that was entirely her own As her friend and fellow student in Worpswede Modersohn-Becker depicted the Worpswede villagers “free of any sentimentality.” In Girl Blowing a Flute in the Birch Forest the largely vertical format echoes the orientation of the trees it creates the impression that the girl is growing from the same root system Paula Modersohn-BeckerPaula Modersohn-Becker Museum In addition to her prolific work inspired by the landscape and people of Worpswede Modersohn-Becker found reassurance and a home in its community She became friends with sculptor Clara Westhoff and began a close relationship with painter Otto Modersohn whose gentle personality and art attracted her The long hours she spent in Modersohn’s studio discussing art formed the basis of their relationship and shortly after his first wife died in 1900 Paula Becker accepted his proposal of marriage her friendship with artist Heinrich Vogeler prompted Modersohn-Becker to experiment with etching practicing on Vogeler’s press to make The Goosegirl The poet Rainer Maria Rilke was also a close friend entering Modersohn-Becker’s life in 1900 when he joined the artistic “family” that gathered in Vogeler’s Worpswede villa Rilke wrote a mournful poem titled “Requiem for a Friend,” lamenting “It troubles me that you should stray back who have achieved more transformation than any other woman.” The Goosegirl, 1899 Paula Modersohn-BeckerThe Art Institute of Chicago, Print and Drawing Fund Standing and Kneeling Nude Girls in front of Poppies II, 1906 Paula Modersohn-BeckerLübecker Museen, Museum Behnhaus Drägerhaus, donated from the collection of Sammlung Dr. Kurt Wünsche, Zwickau At the same time, her depictions of mothers with their babies—Reclining Mother with Child II and Kneeling Mother with Child at Her Breast—boldly fuse the nude with the motif of the nursing mother. Paula Modersohn-BeckerPaula-Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung, Bremen. © Paula-Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung, Bremen Kneeling Mother with Child at her Breast, 1906 Paula Modersohn-BeckerStaatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie Berlin. © Paula-Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung, Bremen Old Woman from the Poorhouse sitting in the Garden, about 1905 Paula Modersohn-BeckerVon der Heydt Museum Wuppertal. Photo by Media Center Wuppertal On November 3 her daughter Mathilde was born. And two and a half weeks later, Modersohn-Becker died of a postpartum embolism. —Jay A. Clarke, Rothman Family Curator of Prints and Drawings Support for Paula Modersohn-Becker: I Am Me is provided by an anonymous donor. Explore the works in our collection and delve deeper into their stories. Join us for a wide range of programs—there's something for visitors of all ages. Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker The artists of the Worpswede artists’ colony devoted their attention to the barren heathland and moorland and the work of the local farmworkers In 1900 the artists left the village for a trip to the Universal Exhibition in Paris where they studied the landscape art of Camille Corot and Théodore Rousseau—members of the artists’ colony at Barbizon that was their model Gustav Pauli was one of the first major figures in the German art scene to support the artist colony in Worpswede and in 1908 organized the first retrospective of Modersohn-Becker’s work a year after her untimely death.Modersohn-Becker’s unique style can be traced within this gallery as an early manifestation of Expressionism which influenced later developments within French and German art in the first half of the twentieth century The exhibited works thus present the progression of Expressionism—in particular of the artists’ group Die Brücke—up to Max Beckmann and the development of Surrealism from André Masson to Richard Oelze and French modern art in particular through the Bremen art dealer Michael Hertz (1912–1988) A good friend and ideological companion of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler—also a dealer—Hertz was the exclusive agent for graphic works by Pablo Picasso in Germany Most German museums and collectors acquired their graphic works by Picasso from Hertz resulting in extensive holdings of several hundred pieces in the Kunsthalle’s collection was that of Picasso’s portrait Sylvette in 1955—a year after it was painted—a prime example of Picasso’s virtuoso late style The tiresome refrain leveled at so many brilliant woman artists is also often attached to Modersohn-Becker: she died too young for us to really know if she could have achieved greatness But that claim does not hold up in the face of the works here Paula Modersohn-Becker: I Am Me at the Art Institute of Chicago until January 12 is the first American museum retrospective of this important artist’s paintings With most of her artistic output sequestered inside the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen even finding a handful of her works in the US is hard one can finally assess her accomplishments and understand just how revolutionary they were Modersohn-Becker had the good fortune of a supportive family with the means to encourage her pursuits life-study classes for women were four times as expensive as those for men.) She first studied art in London where her family sent her to relatives to also learn English joined the Worpswede artist’s colony in Bremen Photo: Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago Sadly Modersohn-Becker’s husband understood neither her work claiming she was “far too ultra-modern,” or her character Modersohn-Becker struggled to maintain her artistic independence; at one point she never achieved the financial freedom or support she needed to continue on her own she gave in to her husband’s pleas and return to Worpswede where she died of an embolism eight days after the birth of their daughter What she left us in her art is an inspiration — a courageous struggle to be a great artist one that faced straight on the anxieties of being human the fraught relationship between the world She chose as her subject matter the people and things in her immediate surroundings as her searing Girl with Yellow Wreath and Daisy demonstrates she abandoned all extraneous detail to lay bare the extraordinary inner force that connects us all The inner struggle to survive the vicissitudes that come our way Coming of age on the heels of Impressionism’s liberation of painting from representation Modersohn-Becker squeezed maximum expression from the most minimal of means Her intense figures and their frequent reference to nature — often depicted by a single leaf or fruit as seen in Self-Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand and Self-Portrait with Camellia Branch — hover on the edge of abstraction firmly within the forefront of Expressionism Using the unusual medium of oil tempera to build up her surfaces to the point of low relief her paintings’ resulting layers of close-ranged hues Every inch of her works partakes of the same incandescence as the subjects they foreground Her figures are not just semblances of individuals As seen in Two Girls in White and Blue Dress lying just beneath their mask like exteriors amid a world that is equally physiologically complex Modersohn-Becker was the first female artist to tackle what it felt like to embody a female form painting herself in Self-Portrait on Sixth (Anniversary) Day but pregnant (although at the time she was not) was one of the first artists to treat drawing as an independent medium decades before it would become accepted as something other than a study from life or a sketch for work in other media Aside from the sheer audacity of her monumentally scaled drawings unlike anything her peers were doing or had yet been seen in the medium and crayon Seated Girl in Profile to the Left conveys as much nobility and depth of emotion as any painting of the same until 2023 these works on paper were rarely exhibited Like the young girl’s emergence from a murky but laboriously scrubbed background with her arms stretched above her head her thin rib cage brazenly pushed forth in Standing Nude Girl they dare anyone to forget their powerful spell It is a testament of the unease that such boldness engenders When he penned his monograph on the Worspwede colony when Rilke wrote to introduce her to the sculptor Auguste Rodin he described her simply as “the wife of a very distinguished painter.” Eventually Rilke changed his tune and encouraged her break from her husband she had responsibilities other than to herself but to return to her husband and society’s expectations the tiresome refrain leveled at so many brilliant woman artists is also often attached to her: she died too young for us to really know if she could have achieved greatness They are not pastiches of those she admired Her highly stylized and abstract figures could never be mistaken for the symbolic exoticisms of Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian figures Nor did she use props as figurative tropes in the same way that artists like Picasso used cultural artifacts to express the emptiness of Western civilization suggests a hollow shell punctuated by blank and an upper lip that visually shifts between an empty gap and a protuberance Something that reminds us that not all great art is made by men prompted by the many unexplained encounters she had with her late father not the least of which was his once showing up at an airport I used to live near Worpswede and walked often in that village The show’s catalog was the first time I heard of the higher costs for women artists It helped me to understand why only women from the upper classes – such as Berthe Morisot ‘glad you had the change to go there We just saw this show in Chicago and were blown away but the large charcoal drawings of the Worpswede people are deeply moving Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value" The Lady’s Dressing Room (1732) BY JONATHAN SWIFT Five hours (and who can do it less in?) By haughty Celia… but this Littlefield review has convinced me to make the purchase your comments reek of what is wrong in today's society and also if entitlement About Us Advertising/Underwriting Syndication Media Resources Editors and Contributors © 2025 The Arts Fuse. All Rights Reserved. Site by AuthorBytes the German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker fit into no category she essentially created her own genre based on her experiences as a woman and on the lives of the men and women she painted she produced more than 700 paintings and 1,400 drawings including the first nude self-portraits known to be made by a woman Here are nine biographical fragments of this visionary artist Is a celebration more beautiful because it lasts longer Paula Becker grew up in a well-to-do family who valued cultural and intellectual pursuits She first studied drawing in London in 1892 and then continued her education in Bremen #2She moved to Berlin to study at the Association for Women Artists a well-respected school open to both amateurs and professionals and became friends with sculptor Clara Westhoff of the villagers and people from the poorhouse—nursing mothers and children—striving to show the reality rather than the ideal purchased with funds provided by The Donnelley Family where she studied anatomy and visited galleries Among the artists whose works she saw and admired were Paul Cezanne #5She returned to Worpswede in 1900 and spent long hours in Modersohn’s studio Though her parents tried to pressure her to stop painting in order to assume her new role as a wife and mother to Elsbeth his daughter Elsbeth and Paula Modersohn-Becker where she met artists such as Édouard Vuillard Maurice Denis and Auguste Rodin and studied everything from Egyptian mummy portraits to Gothic sculpture to works by Edvard Munch her desire to get to the essence of things rather than focusing on surface details Standing and Kneeling Nude Girls in front of Poppies II donated from the collection of Sammlung Dr determined to “create something that is me,” she left her husband and moved to Paris She painted still lifes and landscapes but truly pushed boundaries by painting nude and semi-nude self-portraits as well as dramatic and expressionist paintings of mothers and children The vast majority of her paintings were created between 1900 and 1907 I don’t even know how I should sign my name but I’m no longer Paula Becker anymore either —Paula Modersohn-Becker In a letter to Ranier Maria Rilke “the gentle vibration of things” Modersohn-Becker focused on deep personal expression rather than surface representation Self-Portrait on Sixth Wedding (Anniversary) Day Paula Modersohn-Becker. Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum #8After reconciling with her husband in Paris in 1906 she picked up her daughter and fell to the floor and her works were displayed in a series of exhibitions the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum was founded the first museum devoted to a woman artist Now on view, Paula Modersohn-Becker: I Am Me runs through January 12 Learn more about the artist in this article by curator Jay A. Clarke. In the early 1960s he was invited to do a solo exhibition at Galerie Die Insel in Worpswede, Northern Germany. His friendship with the owner Klaus Pincus, a Jewish collector who barely survived the Holocaust, would last a life time. It was in Worpswede that he met my mother the photographer Barbara Müller, the grand-niece of the Jugendstil artist Heinrich Vogeler, a founding member of the early 20th-century artist colony Worpswede. A young Friedrich examines some of his work Photo: Meckseper family A true inventor and adventurist, Friedrich permanently installed a 1913 steam train in Worpswede and crossed the Alps in a balloon Photo: Meckseper family “Everything is different than what it seems,” was a sentences my father would often declare after a long pause of silence. And in an interview, he pointed out: “The visible world is only one small part of reality. The artist carries much greater abundance within himself than he’s able to represent. He’s pursuing an ever-changing boundary — where only the effect of the moment matters. The stillness of the now at the end of the world.” In Friedrich Meckseper, one of the kindest, most generous and inspiring human beings has left us. My siblings Julia Meckseper, Cornelius Meckseper and I, his entire family, friends, collectors, gallerists and peers miss him tremendously. Friedrich Meckseper in his print studio Photo: Meckseper family review5 February 2024The Big Review: Caspar David Friedrich at the Hamburger Kunsthalle ★★★★★This curatorial triumph highlights the measured artificiality of the German Romantic artist who made work that still mesmerises feature3 July 2024Remembering the Dutch avant-garde artist Jacqueline de JongHer six decade-long career was distinguished by experimentation and humour Your browser is out of date and potentially vulnerable to security risks.We recommend switching to one of the following browsers: .thngs-to-do-title{font-size:30px;padding-top:20px}.thngs-to-do-txt{font-family:unify sans,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px}Things To Do in the Wareham AreaThings to do in Wareham, Self-portrait on the 6th wedding anniversary (1906) …within the world into which he is born he can remain tied to the past trying to fit in and thus to retain the security of embeddedness to emerge from such embeddedness and to become capable of interest in and love for the larger and richer world in which he lives and thus discovering its infinity and inexhaustible mystery This discovery is possible only in the fully open encounter with the world when one does not cling to the protection of the familiar and the past….Only by emerging from such embeddedness and by becoming himself can man realize his potentiality that “the whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself.”                                                                    Solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support Solitude(2)                                                                                                                                                      Credited with being the first woman to paint herself naked—Self-Portrait as a Standing Nude 1906--one has only to look at photographs of Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) to realize that she is utterly changed—metamorphosized into the “Venus of Worpswede,” as Tine Colstrup writes But she is not the idealized nude Venus of antiquity and the Renaissance but a naked woman with a realistic imperfect physical body but in Self-Portrait as Standing Nude with Hat 1906 Modersohn-Becker’s exposed loins have the same orange color as the orange she holds in her right hand The painting seems to have more to do with the variety of oranges in the work—her orange hat with its long orange ribbons the orange fruit she holds in her right hand the yellowish orange she holds in her left hand and the orange hair on her genital—than with the naked body of the immodest faceless woman (As the art historian Kenneth Clark notes the idealized body of the classical nude is deceptive—oddly inauthentic always is—in contrast to the naturally naked realistic body authentic and truthful all the more so because it is imperfect.)  Worpswede is a small village 18 miles northeast of Bremen in Northern Germany that became home to an artist’s colony in 1889 “Not unlike the Barbizon painters outside of Paris or the Dachau Artists Colony outside of Munich beginning in the late nineteenth century artists came to Worpswede in search of an untouched ‘paradise,’ far from industrialized urban spaces and rife with picturesque imagery for their canvases.”(3)  Otto Modersohn was one of the first artists to travel to Worpswede; Paula married him in 1901 The artists who lived and worked there “mainly painted landscapes as well as idealized images of the region and its inhabitants.”(4)  Modersohn-Becker learned to draw from life from Fritz Mackensen and followed his “choice of subjects:  rural peasants and inhabitants of the local poorhouse.”(5)  Perhaps more importantly and influentially he taught her “life-size figure drawing.”  The Worpswede painters were traditional artists rather than the avant-garde artist Modersohn-Becker became whose paintings impressed her when she saw them in Paris at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery in 1900 filling sketchbooks with drawings after paintings among them Italian Early Renaissance paintings She seems to have been particularly interested in Egyptian antiquity she saw the paintings of Vuillard and Denis In 1906 she saw the work of the Douanier Rousseau and African masks at the Musee de l’Homme she saw the exhibition of one hundred years—1775-1875—of German art in Berlin  In 1907 in Paris she saw the Cezanne retrospective “one of the three or four powerful artists who affected me like a thunderstorm.”  Her daughter Mathilde was born on November 2nd On November 20th Paula died of a pulmonary embolism  “A child is necessary for a woman to be a real woman,” she said and in “Self-Portrait on Sixth Wedding (Anniversary} Day,” 1906 she shows herself pregnant with a child her hands proudly around her belly as though holding it This “phantom pregnancy”—a sort of parthenogenesis the production of an offspring without needing a male partner (at the time she made the painting she told her husband she wanted to leave him) is a wish fulfillment It gratifies her desire for artistic as well as personal autonomy symbolizes her—woman’s—innate creative power and suggests that giving birth to a child and making a painting—generating a work of art--are in principle the same Artistic creativity is a kind of phantom pregnancy the artist is pregnant with an imaginary child—his or her work Women are the model artists—primordial artists—for they can create babies with the merest “inspiration”—a bit of sperm But Modersohn-Becker did not need that bit of maleness to give birth to her self-portraits knowledgeable about the work of traditional and modern artists from different countries and with different styles and subjects technically skilled and self-consciously an artist in her own right making masterful paintings with solid figures with a sculptural presence Modersohn-Becker seemed to have absorbed all she had seen if only because it assumes and demands a much greater diversity of individual types I see as my most important step forward.”(6)  On April 9 1906 she wrote:  “I’ve seen wonderful Courbets I think he is greater than Manet or Monet.”  But however much she started out as a realist with an idealizing bent—her peasants are distinctive individuals but also social types—she became a kind of primitivist more particularly what Robert Goldwater called a ”romantic primitivist,” with a peculiar affinity with Gauguin.(7)  Shedding her civilized clothes in her naked self-portraits she has “gone native.”   She had become “the ancient Eve” Gauguin wrote to Strindberg about “who can logically remain nude before our gaze,” in contrast to the “Eve of civilized conception” who “in such a simple state could not move without being indecent would be the evocation of evil and pain.”(8)  There is nothing pretty or indecent about the “naked and primordial” Modersohn-Becker but a certain rugged integrity She seemed to be both anxious and elated about doing so as the letter she wrote to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke who was married to her close friend Clara Westhoff suggests:  “I don’t even know how I should sign my name I’m not Modersohn and I’m not Paula Becker anymore either That is surely the goal of all our struggles.”  On April 9 “I feel so insecure about myself since I have abandoned everything that was secure in me and around me…Will you send me one hundred and twenty marks each month so that I can live?”  On April 22 1906 she writes about her decision to leave Worpswede where she was once happy and secure:  “Those were probably the five most beautiful years of my life the ones I spent in Worpswede,” but “It is too limited there for me,” she adds Seated boy with straw hat under birch trees Clearly she is caught on the horns of a dilemma On the one hand the safety and security—embeddedness--of marriage and provincial Worpswede affording the “protection of the familiar,” on the other hand on her own in “the larger and richer world” of cosmopolitan Paris and the chance to “become somebody,” to make a name for herself as she wrote to Rilke.(9)  She misses the happiness she felt in Worpswede despite the limited sense of self she felt there symbolized by the peasants and handicapped people she identified with by picturing them but she also misses the limitless bounty of art in Paris where she hopes to make art as original as the art she saw in some of its art galleries and museum exhibitions Paris is the place where reputations were made Worpswede was a provincial backwater in an artistically backward country compared to France Modersohn-Becker was in a limbo of uncertainty Money would enable her to afford to live in the big expensive city but it would not make her feel less insecure about herself in Paris As Ferdinand Tonnies wrote in his brilliant study of their difference in a community people are “organically” and personally connected by their shared beliefs and values in a society people are “mechanically” and impersonally connected by their self-interest Social relations are cooperative in a community In a community there is a sense of moral responsibility to others in a society there is a tendency to irresponsible amoral behavior  People care for each other in a community feel emotionally connected to each other; in a society people care less for each other because they are strangers to each other  In a society “exchange value” is the social rule “we know the price of everything and the value of nothing”—in a society as distinct from a community Modersohn-Becker was on her own in a strange and estranging society trying to make it big in a big city—but not sure what “big art” to make in a city in which there were all kinds of “big” new and “big” old art     Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand She was so taken by the lure of the big art city of Paris that she failed to realize that she had come into her own in the small art village of Worpswede—in a community of more or less like-minded artists rather than an anonymous place of competing artists all struggling to be different and modern—make works that were sensationally new as though having one’s art labelled as new automatically made it significant  I think that Modersohn-Becker admired Courbet because he paints his true self rather than like Manet the false selves of the conformist crowd according to the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott while the false self is socially accommodating even as it “searches for conditions in which the true self can come into its own.”(10)  She in fact blossomed into a true self in the solitude of her self-portraits as the flower she holds in Self-Portrait with Red Rose 1905 and the two red flowers she holds in Self-Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand the color of fire and blood is regarded universally as the basic symbol of the life-principle with its dazzling strength and power,”(11) and “flowers are the symbol of the love and harmony characteristic of primeval nature,” and “with that of the paradisal state of innocence.”(12)   In Self-Portrait with Camellia Branch the peonies that seem to grow out of it and the oranges it seems to have hatched symbols of its fertility—creativity The Kneeling Mother with Child at Her Breast kneeling on a small circular aura-like white carpet with the yellowish fruit and green plants around her suggesting she is Mother Nature—epitomizes her wish to have a child as the glorious smile on her face as she holds her newborn baby indicates in the in the photograph of her shortly before she died She would not have come into her own as a woman But it was at the end of October 1906 that her estranged husband Otto came to Paris to spend the winter with her 1907 she writes to her mother “Perhaps in October you will be grandmother again.”  Her mother had to wait until November to become a grandmother again She probably would have a miscarriage in the bustling art society of Paris full of conflicting and ruthlessly ambitious and competitive “advanced” male artists which nourished and supported her as the cruelly competitive city of Paris never would or could have could she give birth to her daughter and her hyper-narcissistic art Even ambitious artists need the security of embeddedness to emotionally support the solitude they need to be creative and become original Solitude:  A Return To The Self (New York:  The Free Press “Paula Modersohn-Becker:  Becoming Me,” Paula Modersohn-Becker Primitivism in Modern Art (New York:  Vintage Books “You will always find nourishing milk in the primitive arts but I doubt you will find it in the arts of ripe civilizations,” Gauguin wrote to his daughter who found it in the “primitive” people who lived in Worpswede and Old Poorhouse Woman With Glass Ball and Poppies I call these works empathic realism—humanistic realism one of the last paintings Modersohn-Becker made was discovered in her studio by her mother who wrote “The brilliance of the hollyhocks made everything else seem dead,” suggesting that her daughter put her life into her art raising the question of how Modersohn-Becker would have raised her daughter Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University of California Press Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London:  Karnac Donald Kuspit is one of America’s most distinguished art critics In 1983 he received the prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism In 1993 he received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Davidson College in 1996 from the San Francisco Art Institute and in 2007 from the New York Academy of Art In 1997 the National Association of the Schools of Art and Design presented him with a Citation for Distinguished Service to the Visual Arts In 1998 he received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign In 2000 he delivered the Getty Lectures at the University of Southern California In 2005 he was the Robertson Fellow at the University of Glasgow In 2008 he received the Tenth Annual Award for Excellence in the Arts from the Newington-Cropsey Foundation In 2013 he received the First Annual Award for Excellence in Art Criticism from the Gabarron Foundation He has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article widely admired for the posthumously published works Letters to a Young Poet (1929) and Visions of Christ (1959) almost religiously moving quality—a harmonious powerful constellation of “God,” “human community,” and “nature”—the distillation of the “cosmic” spirit of being the emphasis on “life” of Nietzsche’s philosophy the self-celebratory fervor of these devotional exercises a poet of unique stature had found his voice The couple set up housekeeping in a farm cottage in nearby Westerwede There Rilke worked on the second part of Das Stunden-Buch and also wrote a book about the Worpswede colony (published in 1903) In December 1901 Westhoff gave birth to a daughter and soon afterward the two decided on a friendly separation so as to be free to pursue their separate careers During those Paris years Rilke developed a new style of lyric poetry the so-called Ding-Gedicht (“object poem”) which attempts to capture the plastic essence of a physical object Some of the most successful of these poems are imaginative verbal translations of certain works of the visual arts and biblical and mythological themes as a painter would depict them defines the painter’s method as a “using up of love in anonymous labor,” he doubtless was also speaking of himself In a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé written in July 1903 he had defined his method with this formulation: “making objects out of fear.” Malte presents his themes as “simultaneous” occurrences set against a background of an all-encompassing “spatial time.” In this work are found all of Rilke’s major themes: love, death, the fears of childhood, the idolization of woman, and, finally, the matter of “God,” which is treated simply as a “tendency of the heart.” The work must be seen as the description of the disintegration of a soul—but a disintegration not devoid of a dialectic mental reservation: “Only a step,” writes Malte “and my deepest misery could turn into bliss.” and when the war ended he felt almost completely paralyzed He had only one relatively productive phase: the fall of 1915 Update your browser to view this website correctly. Update my browser now Situated in the north-east Bremen village of Worspwede the 550-capacity ballroom of the Music Hall has hosted performances by John Mayall The sound system of the Music Hall is managed by Joerg Mohr and Raymond Hassfeld who recently undertook a revamp of the venue’s amplification spec “When we had to decide which amplifiers were best suited to replace our old gear we started looking for great-sounding amps,” said Mohr “but also for something that was going to be technically future-proof For that reason we needed something with internal DSP functionality as well as remote control and monitoring capabilities We were simply amazed by the output these guys can fit into a 1 RU And this is not only referring to the K3s that we use for the FOH PA but also for the M50Qs that are driving the floor monitors Eight monitor channels at a maximum power of 1.250 watts in 2 RU only functionality and green-conscious design of Powersoft products were only part of the story The great support from the guys at Trius Vertrieb in Ibbenbueren really completed the positive experience.” www.powersoft-audio.com David Davies © 2025 Future Publishing Limited Quay House England and Wales company registration number 2008885 Sign In Register View upcoming auction estimates and receive personalized email alerts for the artists you follow I’ve heard many conflicting descriptions of the Dallas Art Fair;  that it’s wild and wacky a place where old money meets frantic coastal dealers From important museum acquisitions to six-figure sales the Dallas Art Fair and its boutique counterpart show the city’s collectors are serious players A tight-knit community of patrons and a resilient state economy keep sales strong in Dallas despite macroeconomic headwinds