(Dresden 1876–1907 Worpswede)
Birch trunks before a barn, 1900, tempera on cardboard, 55.5 x 41.2 cm, framed, (PS)

Provenance:
Private Ownership; Irma Assenheimer (1896-1980), Antwerp (1960)

Literature:
Günter Busch, Milena Schickedanz, Wolfgang Werner, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Werkverzeichnis der Gemälde, Munich 1998, vol. 2, no. 85, ill. p. 77

It was in the first years of her visits to Worpswede that Paula Modersohn-Becker started paying less attention to her great passion – ‘people-painting’, as she herself called it in a letter to her parents in 1897 – in favour of an increasing leaning towards landscapes. Birches are the main feature of her landscape depictions. They were a familiar sight since her time in Berlin and she describes them in a diary entry as delicate, slim maidens, standing in stark contrast to the masculine pines, as she saw them.

Paula Modersohn-Becker’s style of landscape painting accords with her depictions of figures; she reduces that which is visible to its quintessence by capturing the subject in simple, large, clearly structured shapes. In the present work she has chosen her typically close view, keeping the image area relatively tight. Despite its relative flatness, the painting forfeits nothing of its three-dimensionality with its simple and unadulterated representation of nature; on the contrary, the effect is enhanced.

Fine nuances presuppose a direct observation of nature; this is particularly evident in the sculptured composition of the birch trunks. The dynamic, towering birch trunks on the right of the canvas form a strong contrast to the rigid, geometrical panels of the half-timbered barn in the background. Paula Modersohn-Becker dispensed with details; the whole composition consists of surfaces, shapes and a fine sensibility in her choice and graduation of colours. The bright sunlight is reflected from the roof of the well to the left of the barn, and mirrored in the strong blue, red and green tones.

Of greatest importance in Paula Modersohn-Becker’s landscape depictions, as in her figures, is the direct and immediate experience in front of the subject, and her intuitive sympathy for the internal reality of what she is portraying. Changes in the time of day and the seasons offer her yet a further source of inspiration from the natural world.

‘...your birches, the delicate slim maidens, who delight the eye. With their insubstantial, dreamy grace, as if life has not yet opened up for them. They are so enticing that one has to move amongst them, they are irresistible. Some are bold in a very manly way, with strong, straight trunks. These are my ‘modern women’….’
(Paula Modersohn-Becker‘s diary entry, autumn 1897. Natur und Poesie circa 1900, in: Otto Modersohn, Paula Modersohn-Becker und Worpswede, Exhibition catalogue. Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe, 11 November 2012 to 17 February 2013, Petersberg/Hessen 2012, p.147)