Detail View: Visual Resources Teaching Collection: Still Life with Pumpkin

aahi0000375

Still Life with Pumpkin

full view

1905

creation

Paula Modersohn-Becker (German, 1867-1907)

female

German painter. She trained in Bremen in 1892 and subsequently studied in London. From 1894 to 1896 she took a teacher's training course at her family's insistence but then with their permission attended the Berlin Malerinnenschule, from 1896 to 1898. In 1897 she met members of the artists' colony in Worpswede, near Bremen, and in the autumn of 1898 she moved there, believing that in this unsophisticated farming village she could more easily achieve her artistic objective of simplicity (see Worpswede colony). Her teacher was Fritz Mackensen, but her friendship with the painter Otto Modersohn (1865–1943) was more important to her artistic development. She soon, however, came to feel that further progress depended on fresh experience. On 31 December 1899 she left for Paris, where she attended the Académie Cola Rossi. In Paris she first saw paintings by Cézanne, which confirmed her own artistic aims. In summer 1900, Paula Becker returned to Worpswede, where her circle of friends included the sculptor Clara Rilke-Westhoff (1878–1954), the writers Rainer Maria Rilke and Carl Hauptmann, the Jugendstil artist Heinrich Vogeler, and later the sculptor Bernhard Hoetger. In May 1901 she married Otto Modersohn, and a year of close collaboration followed. Gradually she began to question Modersohn's predominantly emotive view of nature, favouring instead a clear, straightforward structure. In landscape paintings she stressed formal principles by depicting treetrunks and the horizon in strictly vertical and horizontal terms. Images were likewise treated as interlocking surfaces of colour. She spent brief periods in Paris in spring 1903 and again in 1905. She visited museums, studying ancient Faiyum mummy portraits, Gothic sculptures, Rembrandt and the Impressionists. She also looked at more contemporary work, such as that of the Nabis, especially Maurice Denis and Pierre Bonnard. But the most significant influences were Cézanne, Gauguin and van Gogh. Modersohn-Becker's consistent, and almost totally unrecognized, pursuit of simplification and abstraction left her isolated on her return to Worpswede. In February 1906 she again set off for Paris, wanting to break away for good from the colony. It was at this time that she produced her most striking works: semi-nude or nude self-portraits and mother and child images. In her many self-portraits she radically simplified the formal structure of the face. She showed her body as a symbol of animal vitality, a life-giving vessel, less an individual character than an image of femininity itself. In Naked Woman Breast-feeding her Child (Berlin, Neue N.G.) she rejected the genre's sentimental tradition in order to convey the experience of giving new life while already sensing one's own death. A naked woman, like an archaic matriarchal goddess, is kneeling breast-feeding her child: light falls on the child, while her face is in shadow. The setting, with oranges and plants, enhances the impression of ritual activity. It is clear that the example of Cézanne and Gauguin helped her to achieve the simplification of form seen in her last works. In summer 1906 Otto Modersohn joined his wife in Paris. By spring of the following year she was expecting a baby, and the couple returned to Worpswede. She died of an embolism three weeks after their daughter's birth. (Grove Art Online Accessed 2006-07-28)

Post-Impressionist

20th century

vegetables

fruit

still lifes

oil paintings

paintings (visual works)

paintings

oil on canvas

69.5 cm (H) x 89.5 cm (W)

Museum Ludwig

repository

ML 76/2719

accession

Cologne, Germany

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