Paula Modersohn-Becker: I am Me was the first American retrospective of the artist and as such, marked Modersohn-Becker’s ascending renown on this side of the Atlantic. Beyond dutiful historical redress, the exhibition’s curators, Jill Lloyd-Peppiatt and Jay Clarke, tapped into the momentum of a triumphalist apotheosis. At the Neue Galerie, across rooms dedicated to facets such as the nude, landscape, or works on paper (the drawings alone were worth the price of admission), the presentation followed a roughly chronological rhythm that, as nearly all treatments of Modersohn-Becker have, hew committedly to the artist’s biography. Quotations from her diaries and correspondence, both in gallery didactics and in the catalog, appear at every turn.

The story is one of self-discovery against odds and strictures: growing up in the potentializing climate of Wilhelmine Germany, Modersohn-Becker found artistic training in the 1890s in institutions open to female students before joining the Worpswede artists’ colony outside Bremen. There, she learned a condensed Postimpressionism and regionalist orientation with blushes of Pont-Aven; there, she also met her future husband, Otto Modersohn. In perambulations between those wetlands, the museums of Berlin and Paris, and both cities’ avant-gardes, Modersohn-Becker developed a committed––if in her lifetime––underrecognized studio practice.

Modersohn-Becker was functionally a student for the majority of her career. Her oeuvre moved between commitments to Postimpressionist tonalities, Cubist structures, and fin-de-siècle naturalisms. Lloyd-Peppiatt’s catalog essay nicely identifies one unifying concept at the core of this endeavor: “I must learn how to express the gentle vibration of things,” the artist pondered in 1898, “their roughened textures, their intricacies” (152). In restrained backgrounds, tectonic figuration, and subdued chromatics, Modersohn-Becker’s compositions commit themselves to the visual integrity of the often-singular object, person, or bit of landscape. Painted strokes and drawn lines are used to pull out the integrity of the motif, not dissolve them. Intensity through gesture, primary colors, or high stylization is rarely the point; rather, affect modulates per broader ensembles of resonance. Her most idiosyncratic device, an enlargement of pupils inspired by Roman Egyptian painting, for example, does not heighten subjective states of being but lateralizes them. They disperse the gaze into a spectatorial acknowledgment described somewhere between an encounter and a solicitation.

It was in this approach that Modersohn-Becker could put forward her most consequential subject matter, women and girls, often in the guise of mothers, children, and the artist’s own self. Almost never do these inhabitants appear with men—Modersohn-Becker’s was a feminized world in which gendered self-determination could gently “vibrate,” to use her word, from within. The summa of these endeavors resides in the artist’s most anthologized canvas, Self-Portrait on Sixth Wedding (Anniversary) Day (1906), which at the Neue Galerie hung at the end of a long axis, punched out from adjacent pictures by a lighter shade of wall paint. It stands in the art historical transcript as the first female nude self-portrait and, moreover, one of pregnancy. In the painting, Modersohn-Becker cups her growing belly, one hand at her navel, the other at her waist. She holds the viewer’s regard without apology.

Self-Portrait works as a quiet declamation of self-understanding and self-possession, but it is no true diaristic document. Her gravidation, as scholars hold, is allegorical. Produced before she was expecting a child, the picture marks the maternal body as one not strictly of reproduction but of perpetual invention, as a vehicle for both assuming and transgressing social roles. Yet in a teleology that permeated much of the exhibition, Self-Portrait foreshadows a somber end. Modersohn-Becker would die of a pulmonary embolism the next year, shortly after giving birth to her daughter. Within the German art world, at least, her accomplishments were recognized soon thereafter. “You, who have achieved/ more transformation than any other woman,” wrote Rilke in his searching, agonized “Requiem for a Friend” of 1912 (Rainer Maria Rilke, “Requiem for a Friend,” in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell [New York: Vintage International, 1989], electronic ed., n. p.).

This promise of self-actualization, of achievement as both a woman artist and a woman in modernity, powers much of the exhibition curators’ readings. “Like many artists today,” Lloyd-Peppiatt describes, “Modersohn-Becker was on a voyage of self-discovery, determined to explore the boundaries of her own identity—as a woman and a human being, but first and foremost as an artist. It was a highly personal journey, concerned, above all, with the desire—one might say compulsion—to realize her full potential” (17). One confession, sent to Rilke in 1905 upon leaving for Paris, without Otto, is marshaled frequently in the exhibition copy and catalog: “I’m not Modersohn and I’m not Paula Becker anymore either. I am Me, and I hope to become Me more and more. That is surely the goal of all our struggles” (Paula Modersohn-Becker: The Letters and Journals, ed. and trans. Arthur S. Wensinger and Carole Clew Hoey [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998], new ed., 383–4, quoted 29).

But this statement, in its oblique tautology, rings of self-estrangement as much as self-realization. One, strictly speaking, cannot become what one already is. In his requiem, Rilke hits on the contradiction of such selfhood. He lyrically splits the line from Modersohn-Becker’s letter into a shifting, relativized deixis: “you . . . didn’t say: I am that; no: this is.” “That,” which predicates the first-person, gives way to an external “this,” but Rilke ambiguously records that statement in the negative. The “I am” perpetually seeks to stabilize itself; artistic discovery is a matter of perpetually deferred identity.

As Anne Wagner suggested some years ago, this condition of irresolution might be endemic to the historical figure of the “woman artist.”  The modern subject more broadly is already one of non-coherence, but this internal drift intensifies for the female practitioner, caught as she is between determinations of gender, profession, and representation, caught in “a rhetoric of separation as the very stuff of selfhood” (Anne Middleton Wagner, Three Artists [Three Women]: Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996], 9). Even Modersohn-Becker’s self-portraits, in their presumed illustration of their sitter’s ipseity, stage more so dynamics of mutability, contingency, and nonidentity as displayed across the exhibition’s numerous examples. Her signature eyes might suggest the profundity of depth, but in their ceaseless frontality, they hint more so at an inscrutable surface.

Such theoretical navigation may serve little purpose in a museum presentation designed to celebrate more than deconstruct. But thinking through it invites critique of what might be the over-consolidation of the curators’ subject, one already denied the fullness of a prolonged oeuvre. Given the ongoing stabilization, even reification of Modersohn-Becker’s art historical reputation—her trailblazing, her breaking of ground, her gender—what other interpretive modalities might now be possible?

Take, for example, the artist’s portraits of women and children, especially working-class residents from the Worpswede region. As is often argued, whereas male modernists like Gauguin and Kirchner ascribed to children, especially girls, a primitive, carnal essence, Modersohn-Becker attended to the quotidian realities of infancy, childhood, and motherhood, from resting to breastfeeding to the talk between toddlers. “Her approach to these young subjects is respectful, inquiring, and reverential” (98), Clarke writes of the artist’s juvenile sitters. Yet the works powerfully gathered in the exposition often qualify any placid intersubjectivity. In Girl with a Baby and Milk Bottle (1904) the interaction between the youngsters is painted too murkily, too weirdly to register as an intimate record of pastoral care. The older child’s face, a classic instance of Modersohn-Becker pairing down detail for mask-like effects, impedes any firm reading of their relationship. In Nursing Mother in Front of Birch Forest (1905), Modersohn-Becker struggles to articulate one of the central motifs of her work, the nursing of a child. Planar elements that later would undergird her compositions slacken here as the breast deflates in convexity. Breastfeeding in this painting becomes a Kleinian interface loaded with connotations of parental ambivalence and distance as much as naturalized maternity.  

These frictions extend to the broader ideologies of these depictions that the exhibition might have problematized further. The catalog texts often draw a favorable distinction between Modersohn-Becker and her artist colony colleagues; whereas other Worpswede artists such as Fritz Mackensen or Heinrich Vogeler are deemed to romanticize or dehistoricize, Modersohn-Becker is seen as “com[ing] closer to the core reality of the local people’s harsh lives” (23) and “[striving] to understand their lives, their habits, and their desires” (53). Much of her painting does refuse pat genre mythologies for a material immediacy, yet she too could rehearse the quasi-ethnographic othering endemic to modernist treatments of the poor, the laboring, and the rural. A rendering like Old Woman From the Poorhouse Sitting in the Garden (ca. 1905) too easily plants its sitter in a state of nature. Modersohn-Becker equates soil with skirt, shirt with seat, and shirt with trees. The occupant nearly grows from the soil herself; her poverty is organic. As Clarke skillfully explores in her essay, such a visual argumentation could mean all sorts of things across German cultural positions, whether a valorization of the rural for a romantic critic or a caricature of the Volk for a fascist one, yet Modersohn-Becker’s own politics warrant questioning.

A journal entry from December 1898, a particularly illustrative account, discusses one Frau Meyer who has been “in jail for four weeks because she and her husband mistreated their illegitimate child so badly” (Paula Modersohn-Becker, 120). Meyer is yet “a marvelous specimen of nature,” one brimming with “a natural sensuality” that Modersohn-Becker connects to her model’s nonnormative family life and procreative disposition. In the following journal entry, Modersohn-Becker describes another session with Meyer. “I had to draw her as a mother, had to. That is her single true purpose” (Paula Modersohn-Becker, 120).

In this fecundity, in this rural sexuality, Modersohn-Becker finds an enervating fount that she can harness and sublate, even if her subjects cannot. Artmaking complexifies, even enhances womanhood, but to whom is that possibility not extended? Modersohn-Becker shaped femininity into alternative modernism at the fin-de-siècle and recaptured a gender essentialization her primarily male counterparts vulgarized and dramatized. But as Ellen Spickernagel has suggested, this project could disavow articulations of class and capital (“‘Das ist ihr einziger Zweck’—Frauen und Mütter bei Paula Modersohn Becker, kritische berichte 8, no. 6 [1980] 25–36). Modersohn-Becker’s formal reckonings with the experiences of childhood and motherhood at times relied on an over-naturalization of their agents, especially within a Wilhelmine social order otherwise disarranged by intense urbanization and a nascent feminist movement.

Instead, what Modersohn-Becker accomplishes best, it could be argued, is not the modernization of femininity but the feminization of modernism. In the titanic Kneeling Mother with Child at Her Breast (1906) informed by both the segmentation of the earliest Cubism and brushy coloration, the painter manages to define a world where the female body can both stand with gendered particularity and modernist generality. The progenitress kneels, nursing her offspring in a hybrid space between a constructed studio and a verdant garden. She acts in the nude, but the metaphors of fertility only go so far: she sits on an artificial plinth, and the background fruits tumble down more like plastic souvenirs than ripe citrus. The mother is sculptural without being reified, natural without naturalized. It is as if Modersohn-Becker shows the childrearing and social reproduction otherwise performed off-screen by the sylphs enlisted by Picasso for his nudes of that same year. Kneeling Mother enacts what Jordan Troeller has recently conceptualized as the sign of not Woman, but Mother, a “definition of intellectual labor as indivisible from the body . . . a kind of potential, epistemological holism, with the power to overcome entrenched dichotomies of the Oedipal, Western world” (“The Maternal in Drag: Towards a Mother-Driven Theory of Artistic Creation,” kritische berichte 50, no. 2 [2022]: 48). For Modersohn-Becker that Mother might have been that “Me,” a subject both bound to and in excess of culture’s conventions.