Artist Colonies: Northern Germany

16/11/20

 

Edition 3 of The Flux Review 

Review of Paula Becker and Otto Modersohn: Art and Life at the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen

17/11/18

Paula Becker and Otto Modersohn: Art and Life

Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen

25 August 2018 – 6 January 2019

As I fall asleep in my narrow, creaking bed, with my close friend and travelling companion in the one beside me, I imagine the myriad conversations that took place in this room more than a century ago – between the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907), whose atelier this was, and her close girlfriend, the sculptor Clara Rilke-Westhoff (1878-1954), as well as with her husband and fellow painter, Otto Modersohn (1865-1943), and Clara’s husband, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). What art critical and philosophical discourses might I have been party to, had I been a fly on the wall all those years previously? Outside the atelier (now a holiday apartment), the village of Worpswede retains the charm that attracted a colony of artists, spearheaded by Fritz Mackensen (1866-1953), to assemble here from 1884, and their varying houses can now be visited as museums and galleries, filled with paintings of the typical cottages with their roofs sloping down to the ground (exemplified by the atelier building itself, although the roof of the studio room was lifted, by Modersohn, to create a well-lit working space for his wife), the surrounding moor, the canal that was built to transport peat excavated from the moor to Bremen (30km to the southwest) on small boats with tar-brown sails, silvery birch trees and endless open skies. 

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Review of Paula Modersohn-Becker: An Intensely Artistic Eye at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

26/08/16

Paula Modersohn-Becker: An Intensely Artistic Eye

Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

8 April – 21 August 2016

Heralded as the first female artist to paint a fully nude self-portrait, one might wonder why Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) is not more of a household name. Her short but highly fertile career – she produced more than 700 paintings in seven years (1900-07), working seven days a week, “with a passion that excludes everything else” – took place at a pivotal point in art history, and her trajectory from strict en plein air realism to a stylised, simplified manner, influenced and directed by her numerous stays in Paris, captures aspects of many of the movements of the time, while repeating personal themes and motifs to create a recognisable and cohesive oeuvre very much her own. A strong-minded character, Modersohn-Becker admired Auguste Rodin for his “disregard for conventions” and sought to follow suit. The low-angled compositions of many of her self-portraits allow her chin to be raised, conveying an attitude of defiance and air of pride, stating: “This is me.”

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