Paula Modersohn-Becker: The First Modern Woman Artist

Diane Radycki, Art Historian, Professor and Gallery Director Emerita, Moravian College

“Ich bin Ich (‘I am me’), and I hope to become me more and more. This surely is the point of all our struggles." In her lecture, Diane Radycki looks at the "me" Paula Modersohn-Becker struggled to become: at her place in the history of art, including her redefinition of the female nude, and at her ever-growing posthumous reputation. A mere twenty years after a lifetime of no recognition, she became the first European woman artist to be honored with her own museum (1927). In this century she became the earliest woman artist to be displayed in the permanent collection galleries of the Museum of Modern Art (2017).