The first major exhibition of Paula Modersohn-Becker at Louisiana

For many people the German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) will be a new acquaintance, while others may remember her from the well-attended Self-Portrait exhibition at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 2012, which included four of her paintings. Now there is an opportunity to get to know the artist’s work better, since over the winter Louisiana will be showing the first major exhibition of Paula Modersohn-Becker’s work in Scandinavia. The exhibition features 150 works, a good 90 paintings and just under 60 drawings, several in large format, and focuses on the artist’s central genres – figure paintings, portraits and self-portraits. Louisiana has been fortunate enough to borrow a wide range of what are considered her major works. The exhibition thus offers a detailed presentation of the artist’s work, from early sketches to late, thoroughly elaborated paintings.

Paula Modersohn-Becker insisted on her integrity as an artist in a male-dominated artistic milieu around 1900. Today her works still stand out with their unconventional approach to the subjects and their strange, raw beauty. The artist’s short life – she died at the age of 31 – unfolded between Paris and the northern German artist colony in Worpswede near Bremen, where among other things she formed a close friendship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Paula Modersohn-Becker has a status as one of the radical innovators of German modernism and one of the first to introduce impulses from modern French art into German painting. She is also considered the first woman in the history of art to paint full-length nude self-portraits, and not least in this respect she points forward to later and present-day themes in visual art.

Exhibition
The retrospective exhibition combines a thematic and chronological presentation of the works, covering the whole oeuvre, with its short span of just ten years. There are in all 745 registered paintings by the artist and 1200 drawings, most of which are to be found today in private collections and museums in Germany, the source of most of the works borrowed for the exhibition.

The exhibition, to be shown in the East Wing of the museum, starts in the Column Hall with a concentrated roomful of the artist’s early and late drawings from both Worpswede and Paris and offers insight into the development of the artist’s work. The drawing was her starting point and is central to her oeuvre from start to finish. The earliest are naturalistic portrait drawings and life studies from Worpswede. They show the artist’s preoccupation with striking physiognomies, and how she did not idealize her models, mainly girls and women, but rather monumentalized them. The drawings from Paula Modersohn-Becker’s stay in Paris have the character of sketches – either drawn ‘snapshots’ from the artist’s movements around the city or life drawings made at the private art schools Académie Colarossi and Julian, where the artist took lessons. In the Column Hall we are also showing the artist’s enigmatic painting and principal work Self-Portrait on the Sixth Wedding Day, 1906.

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