Today on the Google home page is a special Google logo, Doodle, for Paula Modersohn-Becker on her 142nd Birthday. She passed at the young age of 31 on November 21, 1907 but she was ground breaking in her short career as an artist.
She was born in Friedrichstadt, in Germany and was known as "one of the most important representatives of early expressionism," according to Wikipedia. She also was the first female painter to paint nude self-portraits. Expressionism's typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.
Google wrote:
Renowned German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker was born on this day in 1876. Her art bears witness to her courage, boldness, and ambition — a temperament that greatly influenced her short but prolific career.Exposed to the intellectual world from the time she was a young child growing up in Dresden-Friedrichstadt, Modersohn-Becker began her artistic endeavors as a student in Bremen, and at the age of 18, moved to an artist’s colony in Worpswede. There she met her future husband, but hungry to learn more, she moved to Paris to study and urged him to join her.
In the years that followed, her personal life underwent many changes. But through all the turbulence, she continued to paint, producing more than 80 pictures in 1906 alone. Her writings explain this frenetic pace as a necessity to make up for the first two ‘lost’ decades of her life.
An early expressionist, she joined the likes of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse in introducing modernism to the world. Modersohn-Becker was known for her bold choices as an artist — be it her depictions of nude female figures (among the very first women artists to do so), or those of women breastfeeding their children. She tenaciously resisted the strict expectations held of women of her era, preferring exploration and painting over more traditional pastimes.
Forum discussion at Google+.
