NEW YORK, NY.- Considered one of the most important of the early German modernists, the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) was a daring innovator of gender imagery—the first woman artist to challenge centuries of traditional representations of the female body in art. She was the first to paint herself nude, as well as mothers and children nude. She also created self-portraits while she was pregnant. Modersohn-Becker painted the life she was living as a woman and artist and led the way for generations of women artists to come.

Diane Radycki examines the artist’s compelling biography: her professional struggles; her personal anguish, including her irresolution about motherhood; and her friendships with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and the sculptor Clara Rilke Westhoff. Tragically, her life and art were cut short at age thirty-one, following complications from childbirth.

Radycki also analyzes the genres of Modersohn-Becker’s work—figure (especially nudes), still life, and landscape—and details the reception of her work and the rise of her reputation, from obscurity following her death in 1907 to notoriety in the infamous Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937.

As the first American publication on the artist in over two decades, this book is the authoritative source on Modersohn-Becker and makes an important contribution to understanding the significant role of women artists in the complex evolution of modernism.

“Masterful. Diane Radycki provides a persuasive and revelatory argument for the title of her book pronouncing Paula Modersohn-Becker as ‘The First Modern Woman Artist.’ There is no book I know of that has as keen a cutting edge into the artist’s motivations while at the same time placing her convincingly as an important early 20th-century ‘modern’ woman artist. Her short life and growing posthumous fame are brilliantly juxtaposed.” --Alessandra Comini

Diane Radycki is associate professor of art history at Moravian College, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She served as editor and translator of the Letters and Journals of Paula Modersohn-Becker.