Self-Portrait as a Half-Length Nude with Amber Necklace II

On 30 June 1939, at the Grand Hotel National in Lucerne, the Swiss dealer Theodor Fischer auctioned paintings and sculptures that Nazi Germany had stripped from its own museums as "degenerate" and now wanted to sell for foreign currency. The government of Basel had approved a special fund for the sale only the evening before, half of what the museum had asked for. This small self-portrait was lot 97. The bidding went past the limit the museum's art committee had set for it, and they bought it anyway.

Two years earlier, in August 1937, it had been confiscated from the Kestner Museum in Hannover. Modersohn-Becker had painted it in Paris in 1906, working from a nude photograph, probably taken by her sister Herma, and very likely never meant it to be shown. It was first exhibited in 1913, six years after her death. The frontal pose and the large, steady eyes come from the mummy portraits of Roman Egypt, which fascinated her.