"Man Lying Beneath a Blossoming Tree," Paula Modersohn-Becker, 1903.
Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) was a German Expressionist artist, most famous for her self-portraits, including some nude selfies, which raised eyebrows in the Western art world as she was the first to do that. (And in some of them, she's pregnant, a real revolution!)
She received an early education at Worpswede, a German artists' colony, and visited Paris, and developed her own style. Her work generated some controversy, although it's unclear if it was over her avant-garde style or her sex.
She married fellow artist Otto Modersohn, but he was far more conventional & didn't quite "get" what his wife was doing. Her letters show a struggle between her desire for success as an artist and a desire to be a mother; she bore two children, but died young, from a postpartum thrombosis.
In 1927, she became the first woman to have an entire museum dedicated to her work (in Bremen), although later the Nazis tried to shut it down, and did destroy some of her work. Her museum persists, and she's got a foundation, an art prize, and is the subject of many museum retrospectives.
From the Städel Museum, Frankfurt.
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