The present work was created during a very eventful period in the artist's life around 1901. From January to June 1900, she and her close friend Clara Westhoff spent several months in Paris, the city she loved so much, where she attended the private Académie Colarossi. She did not return to Worpswede until July, and her engagement to Otto Modersohn followed in September. They were married in May of the following year, 1901. That summer, Modersohn-Becker created several figure portraits in which she depicted her subjects head-on and directly in front of the Worpswede landscape. The figure dominates, while the landscape provides the framework. The artist brings the figures close to the viewer, presenting them in a highly abstracted manner with free application of paint and broad, clearly visible brushstrokes, their gaze distant and aloof. Although the figures retain their quiet, individual character, they are removed from everyday life—a characteristic that is also common to her later figure portraits.
Modersohn-Becker generally avoids conventional beauty and artistic conformity. Instead, she paints the girls of Worpswede in a way that questions traditional perceptions of childlike, prim charm, entirely without idealization or embellishment, and far from the usual putto-like representations. The head and body are no longer clearly defined, the facial features de-individualized. The artist strives for the most remarkable possible simplicity, avoiding descriptive details: "The great simplicity of form is something wonderful. I have always endeavored to give the heads I painted the simplicity of nature. Now I can feel deeply how much I can learn from ancient heads. How large and simple they are! Forehead, eyes, mouth, nose, cheeks, chin—that's all. It sounds so simple, and yet it is so much, so very much." (PMB, diary entry, February 1903, in: Günter Busch and Liselotte von Reinken (eds.), Paula Modersohn-Becker in Briefen und Tagebüchern, Frankfurt a. M. 2007, p. 140)

In “Brustbild eines Mädchens in der Dämmerung” (Bust of a Girl at Dusk), Modersohn-Becker pushes abstraction and simplification a step further: she focuses increasingly on overcoming the ordinary, alienating the everyday and familiar, thus creating distance between the subjects and viewers. She depicts the girl's facial features in a blurred, highly schematic manner, so they almost resemble masks. She plays with oddities and asymmetries, removing any rigidity from the composition through her free, painterly application of paint. Her novel artistic approach causes controversy and earns her much criticism. In 1903, her husband Otto Modersohn judged: "Paula hates the conventional [...] and now falls into the trap of making everything angular, ugly, bizarre, wooden! The color is splendid—but the form? The expression! Hands like spoons, noses like pistons, mouths like wounds, the expression of cretins. She takes on too much. [...] It is difficult to give her advice, as is usually the case." (Otto Modersohn, Diary, 1903, quoted from: Paula Modersohn-Becker Foundation (ed.), Paula Modersohn-Becker. Die Gemälde aus den drei Bremer Sammlungen, Bremen 2008, p. 90)
After her untimely death, the “cultural politicians” of her National Socialist government also accused her of deliberately seeking out the ugly and degenerate in the 1930s and 1940s, and declared her a “degenerate” artist.
Regardless of her critics, Paula Modersohn-Becker succeeded in developing her own unique visual language and securing a firm place in Modernism within just a few creative years. Her unconventional artistic attitude, progressive stylistic devices, and radical creations were key to this success. [CH]