Paula Modersohn-Becker, Still-life with Goldfish Bowl, 1906
(Picture: Antje Zeis-Loi, Medienzentrum Wuppertal)As women artists in early 20th-century Germany, the four protagonists of this show, Käthe Kollwitz, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin, were at a disadvantage. Though privileged, they were denied access to art academies. So, they would grab opportunities for private tuition where they could, but also seize the chance to portray friends, family and that most available of models, themselves.
They were often expected to conform to the traditional roles of wife and mother. And imperial Germany hated that French-inspired pollution of national culture, modernism. Kaiser Wilhelm II infamously said that Kollwitz’s art had lowered “itself into the gutter”.
This new Royal Academy exhibition reflects how the four women (and a few others) grappled with these unideal conditions, attempting to forge radical artistic languages amid fast-moving personal and social shifts. Some knew each other, though they’re not a defined group. But through its thematic structure, the show charts both shared concerns and individual expression.
The artists’ distinctive voices are immediately apparent in portraits in the first of the three rooms: Kollwitz precise yet lyrical in tone and mood; Modersohn-Becker dense, insistent but serene; Münter bold, vigorous and direct; Werefkin fluid and flamboyant.
Münter and Werefkin were part of the avant-garde milieu that ultimately led to German Expressionism. Werefkin depicts the gender-fluid performer Alexander Sacharoff in Japanese-inspired theatrical guise, clasping a butterfly-like flower. Münter, briskly channeling Van Gogh, captures Wassily Kandinsky in bed and at the dining table and almost caricatures Paul Klee. Her depictions of children are similarly arresting: a melancholy image of a young boy next to a haunting dead-eyed ensemble of a girl, doll and cat, anything but warmly maternal.
Modersohn-Becker too was part of an artistic colony in Worpswede, in northern Germany. But while the bucolic landscapes of her peers (including her husband, Otto Modersohn) inspired her, it was visits to Paris that propelled her far beyond them in originality. She synthesised a fascination with the ancient art she saw in the Louvre while building on Cezanne and Gauguin’s post-impressionist ruptures.
Key to her work is what she called her “personal feeling” for her subjects, a sensitivity embedded in her dense paint. An almost sculptural solidity pervades everything from her self-portraits to the depictions of mothers holding children or a baby suckling a breast.
These tender depictions of motherhood and childhood are adjacent to a wall of moving drawings and prints by Kollwitz, showing entwined lovers and mothers cradling dead children (informed by Kollwitz’s own maternal grief). It’s a pitch-perfect room, bar the inclusion of a single painting by Ottilie Reylaender – perfectly accomplished but jarring alongside Kollwitz and Modersohn-Becker’s singular brilliance. Indeed, the occasional comparisons with Reylaender, Jacoba van Heemskerck and Erma Bossi feel unnecessary, and perhaps should have been confined to the show’s catalogue.
The Kollwitz/Modersohn-Becker pairing is near-impossible to follow, and the final room is anticlimactic. It’s dominated by Werefkin’s later, inferior works, made in Ascona in the Swiss Alps; her contrast-heavy palette, so dynamic when focused on people and interiors, becomes near-hallucinatory and, to my eyes, garish.
But so little of these artists’ work has been seen here before, and so much of it’s compelling, that Making Modernism is otherwise revelatory.
