Paula Modersohn-Becker - Trips To Paris

Trips To Paris

New Year's Eve 1899 Paula Becker traveled to Paris. Clara Westhoff, her girlfriend from Worpswede was in Paris since the end of 1899, because she hoped to become a student of Auguste Rodin. In 1900, Paula Becker studied at the Académie Colarossi in the Quartier Latin in Paris.

Since April 1900 the great Centennial Exhibition was held in Paris. On this occasion the couple Overbeck and with them Otto Modersohn arrived in June. Modersohn's health ailing wife Helen had been left in Worpswede and died during the short time he spent in Paris. Modersohn and the couple rushed back to Germany.

In 1901 she married Otto Modersohn and became a stepmother to Otto's daughter, Elsbeth Modersohn, the child from his first marriage.

Until 1907 Paula made another six extended trips to Paris for artistic purposes, sometimes living separately from her husband, Otto. During one of her residencies in Paris, she took courses at the École des Beaux-Arts. She visited contemporary exhibitions often, and was particularly intrigued with the work of Paul Cézanne. Other post impressionists were especially influential, including Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. Fauve influences may also appear in such works as Poorhouse Woman with a Glass Bottle. The influence by the work of French painter, Jean-François Millet, who was widely admired among the artists in the Worpswede group, may be seen in such pieces as her 1900 Peat Cutters.

In her last trip to Paris in 1906, she produced a series of paintings from which she felt very great excitement and satisfaction. During this period of painting, she produced her initial nude self-portraits - something surely unprecedented by a female painter - and portraits of friends such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Werner Sombart. Some art historians consider this period to be the strongest and most compelling time of her art production.