Paula Modersohn-Becker

Paula Modersohn-Becker did something no woman was known to have done before: she painted herself naked, and pregnant, looking straight out at us. Working in Germany at the turn of the 20th century, she found her way to a bare, heavy, simplified figure years ahead of the Expressionists who would get the credit, reducing bodies and faces to a few solid forms.

She lived much of her short career in Worpswede, an artists' colony in the marshes north of Bremen, and grew restless there. She made repeated escapes to Paris, drinking in Cézanne and Gauguin and the flat, direct power of ancient and folk art, then brought that plainness home to her portraits of peasant women, children and herself.

She married the Worpswede painter Otto Modersohn, and long dreaded that motherhood and art might not fit together. In November 1907 she gave birth to a daughter and, eighteen days later, died of an embolism, aged 31. Her last recorded word, they say, was simply a pity.