Paula Becker was introduced to the artists' colony of Worpswede near Bremen during a brief visit in 1897, and decided to move to the small village in the middle of the Teufelsmoor (Devil's Moor) just a few months later. The surrounding nature, humble locals, and the artistic environment around the resident artists exerted an immense influence on her during her short life, not least on her creative work. Modersohn-Becker found valuable inspiration in her exploration of the French avant-garde, for example, in the works of the “Nabis” or those of Cézanne, Picasso, van Gogh, Gauguin, and others, which she encountered during her stays in Paris in 1900, 1903, and 1905. However, Modersohn-Becker went her own way concerning color: "Lately, I have been thinking very intensely [sic!] about my art again, and I believe I am progressing. I even think I am getting a connection to the sun. Not to the sun that divides everything and casts shadows everywhere and tears the image into a thousand pieces, but to the sun that scorches and makes things gray and heavy and connects them all in this gray heaviness, so that they are one." (PMB to her friend Clara Rilke-Westhoff, May 13, 1901, quoted from: Paula Modersohn-Becker Foundation, www.pmb-stiftung.de/biographie.html) In stark contrast to the bright, color fragment paintings of the French, Modersohn-Becker preferred dark light and muted tones – “what is most beautiful to me, is the depth, the richness in color” – tones that she found exclusively in Worpswede and not in sunny France: “I want all colors to be deeper, richer, and I get very annoyed by this luminosity.” (PMB, quoted from: Uwe M. Schneede, Die Malerin, die in die Moderne aufbrach, p. 84f.)


This warm glow inherent in the dark areas and the earthy, subtle palette is also evident in “Zwei sitzende Kinder im Wald” (Two Children Sitting in the Forest), a work that also addresses one of the central themes in the artist’s oeuvre: figures integrated into a landscape, a subject she explored particularly intensively around 1904/05: “In her portraits of children, Paula Modersohn-Becker achieved a simplification of form that she had always sought.” (Karin Schick, in: Exhibition catalog Paula Modersohn-Becker. Der Weg in die Moderne, Bucerius Kunstforum, Hamburg, p. 92)
The motif is decisive for the work of the entire Worpswede group of artists, but Modersohn-Becker makes it entirely her own. She shows the children in harmony with the nature that surrounds them. “Accompanied and framed by birch trunks, they appear lost in thought, as if separated from the outside world, as if they had become part of nature themselves.” (Karin Schick, ibid.) Their gazes elude the viewer; both are wholly absorbed in their own thoughts and do not seem to interact with each other. The artist creates an image of great intimacy and closeness, of silence and distance, of darkness and soft light: key elements of her distinctive visual language, which distinguish her as a protagonist of German Modernism.

For a while, the painting was owned by sculptor, painter, and architect Bernhard Hoetger, who designed the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in her hometown, Bremen, which opened its doors in 1927. At the time, it was the world's first museum dedicated to the work of a female artist. In recent years in particular, her highly personal, distinctive works have been part of major museum exhibitions, for example at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, Denmark (2014), where the work offered here was also on display, at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2016), at the Bucerius Kunstforum in Hamburg (2017), the Buchheim Museum in Bernried (2019/2020), the Kunsthalle Schirn in Frankfurt am Main and the Fondation Beyeler in Basel (2021/22), the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2022/23), and the Landesmuseum Hannover (2023/24). This year and next, her works will be on display at the Albertinum in Dresden and the Museum Wiesbaden, among other venues, as well as in the artist's first solo exhibition in the United States: “Paula Modersohn-Becker. Ich bin ich. I am me” at the Neue Galerie, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago (2024/25). [CH]