Making Modernism at the Royal Academy — the female artists freed by Expressionism

“Women’s emancipation is very unattractive and unpleasant,” Paula Modersohn-Becker wrote in 1901. But one midnight in 1906 she crept out of the apartment near Bremen she shared with her husband, and ran away to Paris. There she became the first female artist to paint herself as a nude. “Self-portrait as Standing Nude with a Hat”, glaring pink paint flatly applied, face a blank oval, two luscious oranges pressed against her body, is a 20th-century woman’s witty take on Lucas Cranach’s bejewelled Renaissance nudes.

“Now I’m free I will make something of myself. I’m living the most intensely happy time of my life,” she wrote that summer. Then suddenly, explaining “I’m not the sort of woman to stand alone in life”, she returned to her husband and provincial Germany. She died in 1907 aged 31 after giving birth to a daughter.

Modersohn-Becker is one of a quartet of women working in early 20th-century Germany who are the focus of the Royal Academy’s interesting but problematic Making Modernism. The others are Berlin graphic artist Käthe Kollwitz, Munich-based Gabriele Münter and Russian baroness Marianne Werefkin, the last two long subsumed into accounts memorialising their partners, Wassily Kandinsky and Alexei Jawlensky.

It’s a given that each struggled, for education, exhibitions and sales, but yet harder was the self-questioning. “I am a woman, I lack every ability to create,” Werefkin wrote. “I am looking for the person, the man . . . who could give the internal world expression. I met Jawlensky.” Together, the couple left Russia to travel west, and Werefkin stopped painting for a decade to support Jawlensky financially and emotionally. Accompanying them was her young maid, who soon gave birth to Jawlensky’s son.

When, aged 46 in about 1906, Werefkin picked up her brush again, a dam of feeling burst. Her former realist training (with Ilya Repin) kept her drawing tough, but now she worked in broad colour patches, abbreviated detail, and with symbolist intent. “Twins”, detached, angular women in black with twisted faces, holding babies, alludes to her situation, living with Jawlensky’s lover and child.

In “The Return”, a glowing procession — that quintessential Russian motif — features hooded women parading under an incandescent night sky. It takes fire from Werefkin’s feelings about exile and premonitions of revolution, and shows her mystical streak. A synthesiser of art’s shifting currents, she pulls elements from early Chagall, Cézanne’s geometry and, above all, Expressionism, as forged by Van Gogh and Munch, and pushed towards abstraction by Kandinsky and Jawlensky.

Expressionism liberated all the women here to make new art out of battles to make new lives. It’s a great subject, crucially demanding a biographical approach. All the worse a missed opportunity, then, is the RA’s confused, jumbled thematic hang, grouping paintings around banally predictable “women’s” themes (“The Century of the Child”, “Intimacy”). Giving no sense of each artist’s individual identity or creative journey, and wilfully defying chronology, the show looks and feels a mess.

Kollwitz survives the muddle best, because her talent as an intimiste draughtsman recording mothers and children is a single-note achievement. From the unforgettable 1903 etching “Woman with Dead Child”, a desperate mother, hefty as an animal, gnawing at an infant’s shiny, pale corpse, to the violently incised woodcut “Sleeping Woman with Child” (1929), skeletal white limbs piercing a dense black ground, her entire art is an extended “Pietà”.

A doctor’s wife in a working-class Berlin district, Kollwitz wanted to make “motifs from this milieu . . . beautiful”. Her scratchy lines and smudgy surfaces dignify thin, worn bodies. Her association of maternity with mortality — the skeleton and clambering child tugging for the mother in “Death and the Woman” is especially harrowing — began before her son was killed on the Western Front in 1914. Kollwitz had encouraged the teenager to enlist; guilt then fused with lamentation in dark images, full of pathos.

Her bronze “Mother with Child over her Shoulder” (1917), a bent figure bearing an infant who might be a dying burden, or could, just possibly, be peering inquisitively over her shoulder, stands at the show’s core — a work of tremendous gravitas.

Facing it, Modersohn-Becker, dead before the war, appears poignantly innocent. Her paintings evoke conflicted hopes, for motherhood — close-ups of a chubby baby breastfeeding, a maternal hand on a scraggy infant — versus independence. Although unfortunately hung galleries apart, her two portraits of her friend Clara Westhoff (Rilke’s wife) — studies in troubled introspection, one straightforwardly figurative, the other, a year later, flat and stylised — demonstrate her rapid grasp of Matisse’s economy of line and blocky colour. Like most promising young artists, Modersohn-Becker is derivative but conveys the thrill of experimenting.

Münter is a lesser talent. Her most assured paintings depict children: the big-eyed “Portrait of a Boy” and crazily proportioned “Doll, Cat and Child”, sweetly empathetic likenesses in bold outlines and jarring hues which convey childhood’s gaucherie, surprise, fear. Working in the shadow of the blazingly innovative Kandinsky was not easy; Münter retreated either to slapdash landscapes or almost defiantly domestic subjects.

Her minor painting of beribboned packages “Still Life on the Tram (After Shopping)” is the catalogue cover; it sells the show short and implies its restricted ambitions.

For although these artists were not trailblazers, and their output is uneven, each adds movingly to the story of 20th-century art. Failing to acknowledge how they evolved and responded to devastating sociopolitical events, the exhibition defeats its aim of enlarging our understanding of their scope and significance.

It particularly fails Werefkin, whose trajectory from narrative to abstracting impulse is compelling. After the Russian Revolution, her tsarist pension ended and Jawlensky left her to marry the maid. Alone, impoverished and in exile in Ascona, Switzerland, Werefkin intensified expressionist landscape into spiritual visions which are the show’s revelation: the near-vertical pink lake “Movement”, translucent magic mountains in “Life Behind Them”. In “Eternal Path”, tiny figures pass through a chasm between sawtooth crimson/purple cliffs — the procession again, and her own jagged life journey in paint.

To February 12, royalacademy.org

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