The story
In a brick house on Bremen's Böttcherstraße hangs a picture Paula Modersohn-Becker painted in Paris in 1906. She shows herself bare to the waist, hands around her belly as though she were expecting a child, and along the bottom she wrote that she painted it at 30, on her sixth wedding anniversary. It is often described as the first nude self-portrait by a woman painter. She died the following year, aged 31, a few weeks after giving birth to her daughter.
Twenty years later Ludwig Roselius, a Bremen coffee merchant who had made his fortune with decaffeinated coffee, opened this museum for her in 1927. It is usually called the first museum anywhere devoted to a woman artist. The sculptor Bernhard Hoetger, who had known her in Paris, designed the building in a brick expressionist style, with jutting bricks, shifting light and fantastical ceilings, so the house itself is part of the visit.
The Nazi years were hard on it. In 1936 Hitler attacked the culture of Böttcherstraße in a speech at the Nuremberg rally, and afterwards the collection could be seen only by request. Wartime bombing wrecked much of the street, which was rebuilt by 1954. Today the rooms show her paintings and drawings, many lent by the foundation her daughter Tille set up in 1978, alongside a large group of sculptures and pictures by Hoetger himself.
