google doodle celebrates pioneering artist Paula Modersohn-Becker's 142d birthday

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What You Should Know About Pioneering Artist Paula Modersohn-Becker

On Paula Modersohn-Becker’s 142nd birthday, Google is celebrating the under-appreciated German artist with a Google Doodle.

The first woman to paint a naked self-portrait didn’t care much for the traditional expectations or institutions that constrained most European women at the turn of the 20th century. Paula Modersohn-Becker’s parents wanted her to become a teacher, and told her to abandon her “egotism” in order to carry out her wifely duties; instead, she became one of the era’s most prolific artists, and helped give rise to the modernist movement alongside Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.


Modersohn-Becker sold just three paintings, but she pursued her work with a ferocity fueled by a sense that she had “lost” the first two decades of her life. At the age of 18, she defied her parents to join an artist colony in Worpswede, in northern Germany. There, she met her future husband, the older, respected artist Otto Modersohn. Eager to learn more about modern art, Modersohn-Becker soon after moved to Paris, and encouraged Modersohn to join her. The two got engaged, at which point Modersohn-Becker ‘s family intervened and sent her to a cooking school in preparation for her coming marriage.

But she refused to put aside her ambitions and paint brushes, and boldly declared she “was going to become somebody“. Her works often featured regular women, frequently painted nude, as they slept, breastfed and gardened.

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http://time.com/5138852/paula-modersohn-becker-google-doodle/

https://www.bremen-tourism.de/paula-modersohn-becker-museum-art