They were modern: four German artists in the maelstrom of the turn of the century

The hope for the future of many women at the beginning of the 20th century contrasted with the fatalistic attitude of the intellectuals of the European upper classes.

The British historian Eric J. Hobsbawm was very astute when he recognized in The Age of Empire that, amid the reluctance of the bourgeois classes, "only women had a firm confidence in progress, especially those born after 1860."

The Royal Academy in London is dedicating a small exhibition to several of the most important artists of that strange beginning of the century: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin.

Their biographies show the contradictions of the time: they all came from the middle classes with a certain intellectual capital, which allowed them an unthinkable education for most women,

The value of his works is unquestionable.

Several of the women included in the show were part of highly relevant artist colonies, such as the Worpswede School, a town near Bremen where Rilke, Vogeler and Modersohn-Becker lived together.

For her part, Käthe Kollwitz dedicated her work to political art, achieving unprecedented repercussions at her time and which continues to this day: the Reina Sofía gave her prominence in a graphic art exhibition that same year.

She became a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts until the Nazis forced her to resign.

Her works confirm that in her time “only women had a firm belief in progress”, as Hobsbawm points out.

Their biographies are in the exhibition brochure, but in the galleries the works appear introduced by somewhat unsatisfactory thematic axes: "self-portraits", "intimacy", "still lifes"... This broad categorization shows how sterile it is to try to unify the diversity of the works presented.

All of these artists ushered in the 20th century with a vivacity and impetus never seen before, but their ways of innovating often ran in opposite directions.

The term modernism, which gives the exhibition its title, seems to apply better to a historical moment than to a definable artistic current, extended, moreover, to artists who inaugurated abstraction (Jacoba van Heemskerck) or central to German expressionism (Gabriele Münter). .

There are times when it seems impossible to find common ground.

In others,

the association provokes uncomfortable comparisons, which seem to be provoked by the mere fact of being women.

Estrella de Diego already warned of the dangers of this type of anthology, well-intentioned but counterproductive, in her criticism of the exhibition of Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana at the Prado Museum.

However,

, paradoxically, allows for great surprises: the discourse soon ceases to matter in the visit and works that stand on their own appear in their place.

This is the case of Modersohn-Becker.

Thanks to several trips to Paris, he was able to carefully study the work of the Impressionists.

Fascinated by Cézanne, she painted

(1906).

The painting not only reflects the teachings of the best impressionism —a modulation of light and color that is more emotional than clinical, a commitment to the painted material that recognizes it as a new object—, but also opens a look: the woman who observes herself with intelligence and wisdom and recognizes her own worth as a painter, regardless of her public recognition.

In this work, the artist guides the new technique towards politics and brings it back to herself, in an operation that would perhaps only be comparable to Virginia Woolf's

of Her Own.

Not surprisingly, contemporary artists of the stature of Cindy Sherman or Jenny Holzer claim her work for that eloquent gesture.

'Still Life on the Tram (After Shopping)', Gabriele Münter, c.1912.

At that time he also painted

(1906), the first self-portrait of a nude woman in history.

The figure of the artist, not yet pregnant, with a prominent belly, is looked at with ironic sweetness.

Modersohn-Becker did not live through the social changes after the Great War, as she died in 1907 of a pulmonary embolism after childbirth.

However, the painting also reflects the active production of thought around motherhood and nurturing at the turn of the century, in a debate fueled by Ellen Key's book

(1900) and Freud's theories on the formation of subjectivity in childhood.

The exhibition delves briefly into the issue, although the artists' treatment of the subject once again follows divergent lines.

Käthe Kollwitz's vision of motherhood, for example, is clearly marked by the loss of her son Peter by her during the war and by the living conditions of proletarian mothers.

Among her extensive sculptural production, perhaps it is her research on maternal mourning and the iconography of her Pietà that has had the greatest journey.

Hers, for example, is the anti-war sculpture

(1937-1939), located today at the New Guard Memorial in Berlin.

Gabriele Münter's biography ratifies this impetus to design modernity from a personal vision and from the awareness of a new and public voice.

Born in Berlin in 1877 and orphaned at a young age, she was able to afford to manage a small fortune.

She learned from all the artistic currents to which she had access, in all the supports available to her.

She experimented with a Kodak camera and later devoted herself to painting, where she was fascinated by the representative freedom of expressionism.

She was part of the influential Der Blaue Reiter group, along with painters such as Paul Klee and Kandinsky, who was her partner.

Münter's versatility and creativity are enormously stimulating for rewriting cultural history at the turn of the century.

In the sample there are works such as

(1910), whose perspective seems to combine the emotional composition of Van Gogh's

with an intimate portrait of Kandinsky in bed.

De Münter is also the promotional image for the exhibition: his

(1917).

With an intelligent, lethargic and haughty look, her protagonist smokes and wears a red flower on her neckline.

Her head is slightly crooked and resting on one hand, in perfect mastery of the use of flat, intense colours.

There is no eroticism in the look, but an awareness of freedom and a refusal to have to justify its importance.

Münter's artistic practice will speak for itself;

any concession or paternalism will be, above all, grievances.

'Making Modernism'.

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