Seated Female Nude (Self-Portrait?) (c. 1899): Art, History and Details

Seated Female Nude (Self-Portrait?) (c. 1899) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Paula Modersohn-Becker (German, 1876–1907).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Although Paula Modersohn-Becker died in 1907, just as the Expressionist groups in Dresden and Munich were forming, the themes of her work prefigure the movement. This likely self-portrait exhibits her desire to convey not the idealized appearance of the female body but rather its fundamental essence, stripped of all the world’s trappings. She distilled the human body into flattened forms—achieved by erasing and blending the charcoal—and abbreviated the delineation of the feet, hands, and face. The sitter’s piercing stare invites the viewer to move beyond the body as flesh and blood toward her emotional or spiritual state.

Object facts

• Title: Seated Female Nude (Self-Portrait?)
• Date: c. 1899
• Creator attribution: Paula Modersohn-Becker (German, 1876–1907)
• Culture: Germany, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: charcoal with stumping
• Dimensions: Sheet: 62.2 x 33.9 cm (24 1/2 x 13 3/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - German
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1973.35

A detail from the museum

Paula Modersohn-Becker's career was extremely brief but prolific before dying from complications of childbirth at age 31.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• “The Year in Review for 1973.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 61, no. 2 (February 1974): 31–78.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.
• DeGrazia, Diane, and Carter E. Foster. Master Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Exh. Cat. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2000.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.