Paula Modersohn-Becker

Determined, against all odds and full of passion, Paula Becker pursued her goal of becoming a painter at the end of the 19th century. She initially found inspiration in the artists' colony of Worpswede, where she met her future husband Otto Modersohn. Her artistic hub, however, was Paris, the world capital of art at the time. During several stimulating stays there, she became acquainted with contemporary French painting. In his comprehensive monography, Uwe M. Schneede, one of the best experts on Paula Modersohn-Becker's work, shows how the artist translated these important impressions into her own pictorial language. She died in 1907 at the age of only 31, but her oeuvre has shaped the epoch between the old and the new, the 19th and 20th centuries, and paved the way for the German avant-gardes. Today she stands paradigmatically for the first generation of independent, courageous women painters of modern age.