Object of the Month - 'Study of a Girl in a Veil'

1st December 2024

Paula Modersohn-Becker (German, 1876–1907) was a pioneering and courageous artist, today considered one of the most important early Expressionists and credited with bringing the influence of post-impressionism into Germany. Work has been done recently to establish Modersohn-Becker’s place in the canon of art history, with the Neue Gallerie Museum for Austrian and German Art in New York staging a major retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work in 2024.

Modersohn-Becker trained in the 1890s in London, Berlin and later Paris where she visited galleries and admired the work of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh. Her mature work dates from around 1904-1907 where, at the age of 31, her career was abruptly cut off upon tragic death just 10 days after giving birth to her only child.

Within her short career, Modersohn-Becker produced a substantial body of work, culminating in a confident, avant-garde painting and drawing style that was far ahead of its time. The artist was an incredibly skilled draftsman, as evidenced by her early pencil drawings, but strove to develop simplicity of form and a deliberate style.

From 1900, Modersohn-Becker married and took up residence in an artist’s colony in Worpswede, founded by her husband, where she drew and painted the local people. The artist’s models were almost exclusively women, children and babies and the charcoal sketch titled, ‘study of a girl in a veil’, 1902 dates from this period.

The Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen, Germany, was the first museum in the world devoted to a female artist. Further works by the artist can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Kunstmuseum Basel and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

This sketch forms part of a personal collection of works on paper owned by renowned Cork street art dealer Dr Gustav Delbanco (1903-1997) and appears as lot 594 in the upcoming Modern British and 20^th Century Art sale on 4^th December.