Seven years of work, and the first nude self-portrait by a woman

In seven working years Modersohn-Becker moved from Worpswede naturalism to a raw, sculptural modernism, painting the first known nude self-portraits by a woman artist.

What makes her case so useful for this project is the arithmetic. She painted seriously for seven years. In that time she moved from the sentimental naturalism of the Worpswede colony to a compressed, sculptural modernism that anticipates work made a decade later by men who had thirty years to get there.

She died at thirty-one, weeks after childbirth. Rilke wrote her a requiem and, in the process, turned her into a symbol — which is its own kind of erasure. Look at the paintings instead: the thick contours, the frontal stare, the refusal to make the body decorative.

Start with the 1906 self-portrait. She is holding her own stomach, painting a pregnancy she did not have, six years before Expressionism formally existed.