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A home to artists Worpswede, in northwestern Germany, nurtured modernist Paula Modersohn-Becker

By Alison Appelbe Situated on a moody heath known as “the devil’s moor” or Teufelsmoor, the village of Worpswede, in northwestern Germany, is everything a village should be. Houses have exteriors of patterned brick and thatched roofing.
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Jugendstu-style exterior of Paula Modersohn-Becker museum.

By Alison Appelbe

Situated on a moody heath known as “the devil’s moor” or Teufelsmoor, the village of Worpswede, in northwestern Germany, is everything a village should be.

Houses have exteriors of patterned brick and thatched roofing. Here and there an original barn survives. The hilltop church, the Zionskirche, although built in the 1750s of baroque and rococo design, looks more like a simple Quaker chapel.

The village is filled with artist studios — and avant-garde goldsmith shops. A former train station in the early 20 th century Art Nouveau architectural style is now an excellent restaurant called the Worpsweder Bahnhof. And a real train, the Moor Express, connects Worpswede and the city of Bremen, to the south, on the weekends.

Worpswede (pronounced “vorps-vey-da”) has a history of artistic achievement.

Though said to have existed here since the Bronze Age, what is now a sizeable village took shape in the 1700s, when colonizers drained the bog and began to eke out a living as farmers. A century later, in 1884, a shopkeeper’s daughter invited a young German artist of the Art Nouveau named Fritz Mackensen to visit her village.

Entranced by the landscape — its barren ruggedness, subtle colours and huge sky — Mackensen settled down. By the late 1800s, he had attracted and established a small colony of artists that would ultimately gain international importance.

Today, Worpswede is widely known for having nurtured an important group of artists, and particularly the early German modernist Paula Modersohn-Becker. This year marks the 100 th anniversary of Modersohn-Becker’s death at age 31. Galleries here, and in Bremen, are marking the event with exhibits that run until early 2008.

My discovery of Paula Modersohn-Becker began back in Bremen — in a pedestrian alley that runs off the main square or Altstadt, over which looms the 1,200-year-old St. Petri Cathedral and a Rathaus (town hall) that was built in 1400.

The redesign of this alley, called the Böttcherstrasse, was commissioned in 1931 by Ludwig Roselius, an entrepreneur who made his fortune introducing filtered coffee to the world. The 110-metre long Böttcherstrasse is now lined with mostly brick buildings in the Art Nouveau (or German Jugendstil) architectural style.

(It also features, on one building wall, an unusual glockenspiel with rotating panels, also of Jugendstil design, on the theme of navigators who crossed the Atlantic).

Some of the buildings, and the clock, were designed by Bernhard Hoetger — one of the half-dozen artists who, with poet Rainer Maria Rilke, joined the Worpswede artist collective. The most eye-catching among them is the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, housed in a brick structure of rounded edges, decorative relief and wrought-iron touches.

Paula Becker was born in 1876 in Dresden, grew up in Bremen, and moved to Worpswede as a young artist. Under the direction of Fritz Mackensen, she developed an unsentimental style that celebrated the local landscape and peasants. Those who lived in the Worpswede poorhouse posed for a little money. The resulting portraits suggest an extreme naiveté — even cretinism, yet the images are filled with understanding.

In 1902, Becker married fellow Worpswede artist Otto Modersohn. At the same time, she travelled alone, several times, to Paris to study the work of Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and others. Back in Worpswede, she developed a mature Expressionist style.

In 1907, she died of an embolism shortly after giving birth to a daughter. Her final words were said to have been: “Oh, what a pity.” By the time of her death her output was prodigious. Today her works hang in the Louvre, British Museum, National Gallery in New York, and major galleries elsewhere in Europe and the U.S. The gallery in the Böttcherstrasse owns a sizeable collection, including several self-portraits.

In Worpswede, in 1900, a young Paula, together with fellow artist Clara Westhoff, climbed the church tower and rang the bells on a lark. Farmers interpreted the ringing as a fire alarm. In lieu of a punitive fine, the artists decorated the church interior with frescoes (Paula) and sculptured heads (Carla). Modersohn-Becker’s unusual floral designs have recently been restored.

But the most evocative spot in Worpswede is the artist’s grave, where a sculpture depicting a reclining mother holding a child was erected more than a decade after her death. Designed by Bernhard Hoetger, this somewhat sentimental looking memorial was, at the time, highly controversial. Buried beside her is her daughter Mathilde (“Tillie”), who spent her long life (she died in 1998) championing the work of the mother.

A short walk away stands a spectacular house known as the Barkenhoff. Jugendstil designer Heinrich Vogeler bought it 1895, and transformed it from a typical thatched farmhouse into a showcase to the Art Nouveau. Barkenhoff was his home and a meeting place of the Worpswede artists. Today it’s a gallery devoted to Vogeler’s work.

Modersohn-Becker and Vogeler were great friends (Vogeler, like Hoetger, was influential in making her work widely known), and Barkenhoff was an easy walk from the large wood-clap cottage Paula shared with her husband Otto. That house, now open to the public, is still filled with her personal possessions (including the decorative glasses, lamps and mirrors she collected) and her personal art collection.

And, as you explore the village, stories of the Worspede collective continue to emerge. Vogeler, who sympathized with the Bolsheviks, moved to the Soviet Union in 1931. When the Germans entered Moscow during the Second World War, he, with other expatriates, was deported to Kazakhstan, where he died in wretched circumstances.

An exhibit titled “Leven!” (“Living”), including other artists’ reflections on Paula Modersohn-Becker, is running at half a dozen locations in Worpswede. Another, called “Paula in Paris,” featuring her masterpieces, is at the Kunsthalle Bremen. Finally, “Paula Modersohn-Becker and the Egyptian Mummy Portrait,” focusing on a 2,000-year-old art form that she interpreted in her own work, is at the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in the Böttcherstrasse. All run until Feb. 24, 2008.

For Bremen and Worpswede, visit www.bremen-tourism.de. The “Paula in Paris” exhibit at the Bremen Kunsthalle is at www.paula-in-paris.de. The “Leben!” exhibit is at www.paula-in-worpswede.de. For travel in Germany, go to www.cometogermany.com.