Paula Modersohn-Becker, “Girl Blowing a Flute in the Birch Forest,” 1905. Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen. © Paula-Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung, Bremen/Photo: Art Institute of Chicago

The original title of Paula Modersohn-Becker’s show at New York’s Neue Galerie, was “Ich bin Ich.” The title loses some of its rumbling German Verstand in translation to “I am Me,” but none of the potency of Modersohn-Becker’s work, gathered here for only the second time in the United States, is lost. There is a Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen, Germany, but she is not well known to most Americans, which makes this all the more an exciting discovery.

Entering the galleries, the viewer is confronted by nearly life-size charcoal drawings of people—nude and clothed, men, women and children, skillfully drawn. The drawings are transporting, largely because they are so unusual. In a time when women were rarely accepted to art schools, Modersohn-Becker dared create these groundbreaking pieces at the urging of her teacher. Some walls in the gallery are painted a soft sage green, a color referencing several of her paintings which is, for lack of a better word, as gentle as her portraits. Although the landscapes and still lifes are adeptly created, it is the portraits that make this exhibition such a spectacular glimpse into the painter’s life.

Paula Modersohn-Becker, “Woman in Profile, Turned Right,” 1898–99. The Art Institute of Chicago, purchased with funds provided by The Donnelley Family/Photo: Art Institute of Chicago

Modersohn-Becker’s strongest work hails from her time in Worpswede, an artist colony near Bremen, in northern Germany. There she befriended the local farming population, painting and drawing them almost exclusively. The images are powerful—plain people, stocky and sturdy, yet frail in old age. The hands of her models tell the story of their hard daily work, and they are beautiful in their honesty. There is no pretension in this work, only dignity and truth. The image of a baby in a basket, “Sleeping Child,” from 1904, exquisitely rendered in oil tempera, is tender and the artist’s wish for a child of her own spills onto the canvas. The respect she pays several nursing mothers in the show is palpable, but then, all of Modersohn-Becker’s subjects are rendered in a personal and respectful manner. These were the people she grew to love and her esteem for them is undeniably apparent in both the paintings and drawings.

In 1905, Modersohn-Becker went to Paris for the third and last time, leaving her husband, the painter Otto Modersohn, behind, saying that her years in Worpswede had been “the five most beautiful years of my life,” but adding she was “too limited” there. In Paris, she found inspiration in the work of Gauguin and Cézanne, flirting only briefly with emulations of their work, but ultimately retaining her own style.

In a letter to her dear, close friend Rainer Maria Rilke in 1906, Modersohn-Becker wrote, “I am Me, and I hope to become Me more and more. That is surely the goal of all our struggles.” On November 2, 1907, she gave birth to a daughter named Mathilde. Less than three weeks later, on November 20 she died from a pulmonary embolism. Studying the work in this remarkable exhibition, it’s clear that she found herself, that she became more Me, certainly in her art, if not in her abbreviated life.

“Paula Modersohn-Becker: I Am Me” is on view through January 12, 2025, at the Art Institute of Chicago, Modern Wing entrance at 159 East Monroe.