From Worpswede

Paula Modersohn-Becker and Otto Modersohn

More than any other place in Germany, the name Worpswede evokes the gradual emergence of art into the modern era around 1900. From 1889, the artists Fritz Mackensen, Hans am Ende, Otto Modersohn, Fritz Overbeck and Heinrich Vogeler formed an artist group. Shortly before the turn of the century they were joined by Paula Becker, Clara Westhoff and Ottilie Reyländer, at first as students of the Worpswede group. 

The Worpswede artist colony came to represent the rejection of traditional academy painting in favour of painting in nature. Questions of plein-air painting and composition were heatedly discussed. Throughout, Otto Modersohn and Paula Becker, who married in 1901, worked tirelessly to develop new visual ideas. 

Between 1900 and her early death in 1907, Paula Modersohn-Becker regularly travelled between Worpswede and Paris. Because of this, she played a decisive role in joining the new beginnings initiated by the Worpswede group with the ideas of modernism in Paris. She developed compositions and pictorial concepts of an unprecedented power. 

The exhibition in the Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation brings together works by Paula Modersohn-Becker and Otto Modersohn, using them as quintessential instances of the forces set into motion by the Worpswede artist colony, which helped to usher in the early twentieth century avant-garde epoch.

The exhibition is accompanied by two readings which will bring to life the era and spirit of this new beginning.