1876 -1907 · Dresden, Worpswede and Paris

Frontal figures, simplified shapes and earthy colors make Paula Modersohn-Becker a pioneer of German expressionism.

Paula Becker was born in Dresden in 1876 and died in Worpswede in 1907. After training in drawing and painting in Berlin, she joined the artists' colony of Worpswede, near Bremen, in 1898, where she studied with Fritz Mackensen and met the painter Otto Modersohn, whom she married in 1901. The landscape of peat bogs, peasant women, children and the elderly became her essential subjects. However, she quickly broke away from the sentimental naturalism of the colony. During several stays in Paris between 1900 and 1907, she discovered Cézanne, Gauguin, the Nabis, Antiquity and the masters of the Louvre. Her bodies then gained in frontality, her volumes became simplified and her material becomes matte, dense and earthy. Three boys bathing in the canal places childhood in a compact and silent scene. The Old Peasant Woman with Goat gives a rural model a monumentality without anecdote. The Annunciation and The Adoration of the Magi reinvent the sacred subject with archaic forms. Her numerous self-portraits, some of which show her naked and pregnant in an imaginary way, are among the most radical assertions of a modern artist. She died at thirty-one, a few weeks after the birth of her daughter Mathilde. The "Paula Modersohn-Becker" selection notably compares Three Boys Bathing in the Canal and The Adoration of Mages. Its reading favors details.

Modersohn-Becker simplifies to intensify: the face becomes presence, the body becomes volume and the earthy color carries a silent inner life.