Seated Female Nude (Self-Portrait?)
Paula Modersohn-Becker (German, 1876–1907)
c. 1899
- Medium
- charcoal with stumping
- Classification
- Drawing
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 62.2 x 33.9 cm (24 1/2 x 13 3/8 in.)
- Culture
- Germany, 19th century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Drawings
- Credit line
- Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Adult profiles and older: its museum's description or title mentions nudity. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Although Paula Modersohn-Becker died in 1907, just as the Expressionist groups in Dresden and Munich were forming, the themes of her work prefigure the movement. This likely self-portrait exhibits her desire to convey not the idealized appearance of the female body but rather its fundamental essence, stripped of all the world’s trappings. She distilled the human body into flattened forms—achieved by erasing and blending the charcoal—and abbreviated the delineation of the feet, hands, and face. The sitter’s piercing stare invites the viewer to move beyond the body as flesh and blood toward her emotional or spiritual state.
