By Mary Sherman

The tiresome refrain leveled at so many brilliant woman artists is also often attached to Modersohn-Becker: she died too young for us to really know if she could have achieved greatness. But that claim does not hold up in the face of the works here.

Paula Modersohn-Becker: I Am Me at the Art Institute of Chicago until January 12, 2025, is the first American museum retrospective of this important artist’s paintings, prints and drawings. With most of her artistic output sequestered inside the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen, Germany, even finding a handful of her works in the U.S. is hard. But with this thoughtful exhibition, one can finally assess her accomplishments and understand just how revolutionary they were.

Born in 1876, Modersohn-Becker had the good fortune of a supportive family with the means to encourage her pursuits. (At the time, life-study classes for women were four times as expensive as those for men.) She first studied art in London, where her family sent her to relatives to also learn English. Afterward, she studied in Berlin and then, in 1898, joined the Worpswede artist’s colony in Bremen. There she met and, later, married the painter Otto Modersohn, eleven years her senior.

Sadly Modersohn-Becker’s husband neither understood her work, claiming she was “far too ultra-modern,” nor her character, writing in his diary, “we understand each other well in art, but never in life.” Not surprisingly then, Modersohn-Becker struggled to maintain her artistic independence; at one point,  she left Modersohn to escape to Paris. Unfortunately, once there, she never achieved the financial freedom or support she needed to continue on her own. In 1907, she gave into her husband’s pleas and return to Worpswede, where she died of an embolism eight days after the birth of their daughter. She was 31.

What she left us in her art is an inspiration – a courageous struggle to be a great artist, one that faced straight on the anxieties of being human, the fraught relationship between the world, ourselves and others. She chose as her subject matter the people and things in her immediate surroundings, the region’s poor and working-class, as well as herself. In her work, as her searing Girl with Yellow Wreath and Daisy demonstrates, she abandoned all extraneous detail to lay bare the extraordinary, inner force that connects us all. The sense of life itself. The inner struggle to survive the vicissitudes that come our way.

Coming of age on the heels of Impressionism’s liberation of painting from representation, Modersohn-Becker squeezed maximum expression from the most minimal of means. Her intense figures and their frequent reference to nature – often depicted by a single leaf or fruit, as seen in Self-Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand – hover on the edge of abstraction, firmly within the forefront of Expressionism. Using the unusual medium of oil tempera to build up her surfaces to the point of low relief, her paintings’ resulting layers of close-ranged hues, often scratched and scarred, radiate a palpable intensity. Every inch of her works partakes of the same incandescence as the subjects they foreground. Her figures are not just semblances of individuals. As seen in Two Girls in White and Blue Dress, with The Arms around Each Other, they are masses of quiet, quivering sensation, lying just beneath their mask like exteriors, amid a world that is equally physiologically complex.

Modersohn-Becker was the first female artist to tackle what it felt like to embody a female form, painting herself in Self-Portrait on Sixth (Anniversary) Day, not only nude, but pregnant (although at the time she was not). Equally radical, she signed that particular canvas P.B., leaving out her husband’s last name.

She also, as this show so amply demonstrates, was one of the first artists to treat drawing as an independent medium, decades before it would become accepted as something other than a study from life or a sketch for work in other media. These works of hers are stunning. Aside from the sheer audacity of her monumentally scaled drawings, their humanity is unique, unlike anything her peers were doing or had yet been seen in the medium.

For instance, her charcoal, chalk and crayon, Seated Girl in Profile to the Left conveys as much nobility, expression and depth of emotion as any painting of the same. Yet, until 2023 these works on paper were rarely exhibited. Even in Bremen. Seeing them is an incredible revelation. Like the young girl’s emergence from a murky, but laboriously scrubbed background with her arms stretched above her head, her thin ribcage brazenly pushed forth in Standing Nude Girl, Turned Left with Crossed Arms, they dare anyone to forget their powerful spell.

Standing Nude Girl, Turned Left with Crossed Arms, like all Modersohn-Becker’s work, however, also serves as a cautionary tale. It is a testament of the unease that such boldness engenders. Ever her close friend and confidante, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who supported her efforts in private, failed her in public. When he penned his monograph on the Worspwede colony, he left out not only her name, but all the female artists there, including his wife, the sculptress Clara Westhoff. And, again, when Rilke wrote to introduce her to the sculptor Auguste Rodin, he described her simply as “the wife of a very distinguished painter.” Eventually Rilke changed his tune and encouraged her break from her husband, but the damage already was done. Her family had made it known that, with her marriage, she had responsibilities other to herself. She, thus, saw no other recourse, but to return to her husband and society’s expectations.

Consequently, the tiresome refrain leveled at so many brilliant woman artists is also often attached to her: she died too young for us to really know if she could have achieved greatness. But that claim does not hold up in the face of the works here.  They are not pastiches of those she admired. Her highly stylized and abstract figures could never be mistaken for the symbolic exoticisms of Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian figures. Nor did she use props as figurative tropes in the same way that artists like Picasso used cultural artifacts, such as African masks, to express the emptiness of Western civilization.

Modersohn-Becker, instead, responded emotionally to the world. Her portrait of Rilke, for instance, suggests a hollow shell punctuated by blank, dead eyes, and an upper lip that visually shifts between an empty gap and a protuberance, on the brink of a thought, held back. Not, perhaps, like her feelings towards him at the time. Her Expressionism is uniquely her own. Something not seen before. Something worthy of our attention. Something that reminds us that not all great art is made by men.

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For two decades Mary Sherman wrote about the arts, beginning as a freelancer for the Chicago Reader, followed by being the art critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and, later, as a regular contributor to The Boston Globe, Boston Herald, and ARTnews among many other national and international publications. In addition to writing, she is a widely exhibited artist, a teacher at Boston College, and founding director of TransCultural Exchange. Currently, Mary is at work on her first book A Legacy of Deceit. It is part memoir, part Cold War investigative journalism, prompted by the many unexplained encounters she had with her late father, not the least of which was his once showing up at an airport, a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.