Oil on canvas mounted on board, circa 1900-05. 205x250 mm; 8x10 inches.
Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) was born into an intellectual, aristocratic family outside of Dresden-Friedrichstadt. Her study of art began in Bremen when her family relocated there in 1888, and continued in Paris when she moved there with a friend in 1900. She died in 1907 at age 31 from complications of childbirth, but her avant-garde and intimate artistic output affirms her as one of the first modern female artists.
She was influenced by the work of the Post-Impressionists Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Cézanne, as well as the Fauvists such as Henri Matisse and André Derain. It is a testament to her talent and strong will that she was able to advance herself into the male-dominated circles of German artists who would soon be known as the Expressionists. The portraits she produced do not acquiesce to the eroticized depictions of the female form common to the time. Through her luminous yet muted color palette, she was able to simultaneously elevate her subjects and portray them with complete veractiy. Widely considered the first female Western artist to paint a nude self portrait and the first to depict herself pregnant, Modersohn-Becker strived to reinvent the portrayal of women in art. Gustav Pauli, a museum director in Bremen, stated, 'She lacks nearly everything that is needed to win hearts and flatter the casual glance.' The ungraceful poses of her subjects, her choice to cast herself as the subject of many paintings, and her muted color palette and impasto application of paint convey a starkly honest, realistic experience of womanhood.
In the early 1900s while she was in Germany raising her step-child in the first few years of her marriage, she was especially interested in painting scenes of farms and the people who worked on them. The current lot exemplifies her painting style and her veracity. This work is similar to other paintings of cows and calves by Modersohn-Becker from the early 1900s (see Busch and Werner, Paula Modersohn-Becker, 1876-1906, Verzeichnis der Gemalde, Munich, 1998, numbers 76, 208, 210 and 541).
