Paula Modersohn-Becker and Worpswede Artists. Drawings and Engravings 1895-1906
22 September 2012 - 11 November 2012
Halls N 338-342 3rd floor of the Winter Palace

On September 21st, 2012, the Winter Palace hosted the opening of Paula Modersohn-Becker and the Worpswede Artists, Drawings and Engravings from 1895-1906, an exhibit jointly organized by the State Hermitage Museum and the Goethe German Cultural Center in St. Petersburg in the Institute for Foreign Countries Relations. This exhibit is being held as part of the Year of Germany in Russia and Year of Russia in Germany 2012 program. This exhibition, where more than sixty drawings and engravings by Paula Modersohn-Becker and her colleagues from Worpswede will be presented, as well as documentary photographs about their lives, will familiarize visitors with one of the most striking moments in German art in the 19th and 20th centuries.

At the end of the 1880's, young artists, including Otto Modersohn, Fritz Mackensen, Hans am Ende, Fritz Overbeck and Heinrich Vogeler, settled in the small village of Worpswede, near the city of Bremen in the north of Germany. They established an artists’ colony, dedicated their art to the wilderness of that remote region, its people and their ancient way of life. In the mid 1890's, after a series of exhibits in the major artistic centers of Germany, the Society of Worpswede Artists achieved success. Considering the important role of engraving and the interest in it at the end of the 19th century, it was not an accident that in 1895 the Union of Engravers was organized in Weiherberg, where an engraving studio was equipped on the initiative of Hans am Ende. The suites of engravings presented at the exhibit, entitled Sheet from the Weiherberg Series. The First Series of Original Etchings (1895) and Sheet from Worpswede Series. New Series. 12 Original Etchings (1897) belong to the period of this group of artist’s greatest successes.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, writers and artists began to arrive in the quiet village, the masters began to acquire followers and students, including Paula Becker. Paula's attempt to become a professional artist was a challenge to society in itself. The path to the fine arts profession was practically closed, since a woman’s desire to work on portraiture professionally was regarded as a deviation from the norm, even in educated circles. Paula was able to proceed contrary to public opinion.

The young female artist talent developed under significant influence from the members of the Worpswede artists' colony. Paula initially studied with Fritz Mackensen. Her works are painted with a strong, certain hand. The absence of academic instruction and a hard male approach in her painting gave a special, someone blunt expressivity to forms that are charged with simplicity and energy. The thousand or so surviving drawings by Paula Modersohn-Becker speak about the artist’s serious, systematic work. Only eleven of them are presented at the exhibit. Her earlier work, such as Boat in the Swamp and Naked Tree Against the Backdrop of a Landscape, were intended define the central theme of the landscape. Both drawings demonstrated Paula's dedication to Jugendstil, which is characteristic for the first years of work at Worpswede.

Heinrich Vogeler introduced the artist to the technique of engraving. The engraving entitled Peasant Girl Feeding Geese is a reflection of this collaboration between the two artists; it is closest in style to the work of Vogeler. For Paula, engraving remained an experiment that produced interesting results, yet remained on the periphery of her art.

Paula Modersohn-Becker's engravings, like her drawings, are distinguished by a particularly emotional quality. These small plates have the monumental quality particular to her portraits. She created only thirty of them, and no intermediate impressions have been preserved. The famous Berlin printer Otto Felzing, within whom the Worpswede artists collaborated, printed them several years after her death.

In 1901, Paula married the landscape painter Otto Modersohn, whose art also influenced her. The six landscape sketches by Otto Modersohn presented at the exhibit, which do not have that distinctive quality of lively searching that pervades his wife's work, make it possible to compare the work of these two spouses.

The extensive Worpswede artistic circle proved to be too small for Paula. In 1900, on the eve of great discoveries in art, she left for Paris, where new horizons in contemporary art were opening. Several months spent in the French capital help the artist to find her own path in art, far beyond the national school, and she found herself compelled to return there several times during the course of her brief life.

An illustrated academic catalogue has been prepared for this exhibit (The Publishing House of the State Hermitage Museum, 2012). The curator of the exhibit is Mikhail Olegovich Dedinkin, Deputy Head of the Western European Fine Art Department of the State Hermitage Museum.