Making Modernism: Trailblazing Female Artists at London’s Royal Academy of Arts

Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter und Marianne Werefkin were all artists working in Germany in the early 1900s. These four women were just as instrumental in shaping modernism as their male colleagues, but outside of Germany, they are still less known. London’s Royal Academy of Arts is now devoting an exhibition to these four exceptional women and some of their other female colleagues, the first major UK exhibition to focus on them. The exhibition is on until 12 February 2023. Read on for some key facts about these four women.

Käthe Kollwitz (8 July 1867, Königsberg, East Prussia – 22 April 1945, near Dresden, Germany)

Käthe Kollwitz, Self-portrait, 1934. Lithograph on paper, 20 x 18.7 cm. © Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln

Käthe Kollwitz was a graphic artist and sculptor. She grew up in a liberal middle-class family and studied painting in Berlin and Munich. She married a doctor who treated the urban poor in his clinic in a working-class part of Berlin. They lost their youngest son in battle in 1914, the first year of World War One. Many of her most powerful works portray tragic victims of social injustice and war. Her works depicting a grieving mother or grieving parents have been used as war memorials. 

Paula Modersohn-Becker (8 February 1876, Dresden, Germany – 30 November 1907, Worpswede, Germany)

Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-portrait as a Standing Nude with Hat, summer 1906. Oil tempera on canvas. 40 x 19.5 cm. Paula Modersohn-Becker Stiftung, Bremen, on loan from a private collection

Paula Modersohn-Becker began to study drawing when she was twelve. She joined the artists’ colony Worpswede near Bremen as a young woman, painting landscapes and scenes of peasant life. She married the Worpswede painter Otto Modersohn in 1901. From 1900, Modersohn-Becker spent extended periods in Paris. Inspired by the works of Cézanne, Gauguin and other French artists, she started to simplify her forms and to use colour in a symbolic way. She is famous for her (often nude) self-portraits. Tragically, she died soon after giving birth to her first child. 

Gabriele Münter (19 February 1877, Berlin – 19 May 1962, Murnau, Germany)

Gabriele Münter, Portrait of Anna Roslund, 1917. Oil on canvas, 94 x 68 cm. Leicester Museums & Galleries. © DACS 2022

Gabriele Münter was one of the founding members of the German expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”), one of the most important groups of avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century. Münter was born into an upper-middle class family in Berlin. She studied piano and enjoyed drawing while growing up. Both her parents were dead by the time she was 21, leaving her financially independent and able to live a life unrestricted by conventions. In Munich, she studied with the painter Wassily Kandinsky, one of the first abstract painters. Münter and Kandinsky fell in love, embarking on a relationship that lasted over a decade. She joined Kandinsky when he founded “Der Blaue Reiter,” a loose group of experimental artists that organized group exhibitions between 1911 and 1914. Münter’s highly expressive, representational paintings use bold lines and strong, unusual colours. When the Nazis forbid modernist art, Münter hid the works of Kandinsky, herself, and other members of “Der Blaue Reiter” in her house in Murnau in the Bavarian countryside. On her eightieth birthday, she gifted her collection (more than 1000 works) to the Lenbachhaus in Munich.

Marianne von Werefkin (10 September 1860, Tula, Russia - 6 February 1938, Ascona, Switzerland)

Marianne Werefkin, The Contrasts, 1919. Tempera on paper on cardboard, 81.5 x 65.5 cm. Collection of the Municipality of Ascona, Museo Comunale d'Arte Moderna, Ascona

Russian painter Marianne von Werefkin was a key figure in the German expressionist movement. She was born into a Russian aristocratic family. Her mother was a painter, her father made a brilliant career in Russia’s imperial army. Werefkin became a favourite student of Russian realist painter Ilya Repin, famous for his paintings depicting the plight of the Russian poor. Werefkin was determined and brave, relearning how to use her hand after accidentally shooting her right, painter’s hand during a hunt in 1888, losing her middle finger. She managed to reach such a level of perfection in realist painting that she became known as the “Russian Rembrandt.”  

Unfortunately, Werefkin fell in love with a fellow Repin student, Alexei Jawlensky. The couple moved to Munich in 1896. Werefkin didn’t paint for a decade, rethinking her own approach to painting while devoting herself to Jawlensky’s career, even though she knew he was cheating on her. Her salon became a central feature of the emerging German expressionist movement. She returned to painting aged 46, with powerful colours and a revolutionary, vertiginious sense of movement. Impoverished after the Russian revolution, and finally separated from Jawlensky, she spent the last quarter of her life in Switzerland, in Ascona on the Lago Maggiore.