Adult Education Centre: Paula Modersohn-Becker. Painting with a Mind of Its Own – A Feminist Breakthrough into Modernism

Today, Paula Modersohn-Becker is regarded as one of the most influential artists of the modern era. Yet when she embarked on her career as an artist in 1896, women were still strictly barred from studying art at art academies. Pursuing art professionally ran counter to society’s expectations of women’s roles – and anyone who devoted herself to it nonetheless was quickly denigrated as a ‘painting woman’. Paula Modersohn-Becker did not let this deter her in the slightest: in the North German artists’ colony of Worpswede, she defied the expectation that she should merely be the ‘better half’ at the side of her husband, the painter Otto Modersohn.

During several stays in Paris, she sought artistic and social freedom. When she died at the age of just 30, she left behind a vast body of work comprising almost 800 paintings and 1,500 drawings, which clearly broke with academic painting conventions. Particularly characteristic are her expressive portraits of women and children, characterised by radical simplicity, as well as her self-portraits.

In her lecture, Prof. Dr Renate Buschmann, academic director of the WittenLab. Zukunftslabor Studium fundamentale at Witten/Herdecke University, how Paula Modersohn-Becker’s legacy has gradually gained institutional recognition over time and how, from the 1970s onwards, the artist became a role model in the feminist women artists’ movement, which celebrated self-assertion as a driving force for emancipation.

The event will take place on Tuesday, 13 October, from 8 pm at Haus Witten, Ruhrstraße 86. Admission at the door costs 7 euros (5 euros reduced rate, e.g. for students). The Bürgeruni is a joint initiative of vhs Witten | Wetter | Herdecke and the WittenLab. Zukunftslabor Studium fundamentale at the Witten/Herdecke University.