Paula Modersohn-Becker – Biography of Paula Modersohn-Becker

Paula Modersohn-Becker, original name of Paula becker, was born on February 8, 1876 in Dresden, Germany. She was a visual artist who helped introduce the styles of late 19th century Post-Impressionist painters such as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh into German art.

Becker He became interested in art at an early age and began studying drawing in 1888, when his family moved to Bremen, Germany. Sent to England to complete her education, attending St. John’s Wood School of Art. Upon her return to Germany, the artist trained to become a teacher and then attended (1896-98) the traditional School for Women Artists in Berlin .

In 1898, as a student of Fritz Mackenson, Becker he joined the Worpswede school, a group of regional artists who lived in an artist colony near Bremen. Like many of those painters, he created sentimental landscapes and scenes of peasant life. In Worpswede she befriended the sculptor Clara Westhoff (who later married the poet Rainer Maria Rilke), and in 1900 they traveled together to Paris, where she was influenced by the Post-Impressionist paintings of Paul Cézanne.

In 1901, the artist married Otto Modersohn, another Worpswede painter. She spent two more periods of study in Paris in 1903 and 1905, and the contemporary art she discovered there left her increasingly dissatisfied with the aims of the Worpswede artists. The work of Cézanne, Gauguin, and other French artists, such as those of the Nabis group, inspired her to use simplified forms and symbolic, rather than naturalistic, color. She left her husband in 1906 to settle in Paris, where she painted the expressive and often nude self-portraits that are her most respected works. Her husband followed her there later that year, and she returned to Worpswede with him in 1907.

The Modersohn-Becker style continued to evolve; in his mature paintings, like Self-Portrait with a Camellia (1907), combined a lyrical naturalism with large areas of simplified color reminiscent of Gauguin and Cézanne. Because she was more interested in expressing her inner feelings than in an accurate representation of reality, she is frequently associated with the expressionist style.

She died shortly after giving birth to her only child, on November 30, 1907, at the age of 31.