Paula Modersohn-Becker Quotes

#1. Lack of money rivets us firmly to the ground, one's wings are clipped.

Paula Modersohn-Becker

#2. In art one is usually totally alone with oneself.

Paula Modersohn-Becker

#3. How happy I would be if I could give figurative expression to the unconscious feeling that often murmurs so softly and sweetly within me.

Paula Modersohn-Becker

#4. I know I shall not live very long ... If I've painted three good pictures, then I shall leave gladly with flowers in my hand and my hair.

Paula Modersohn-Becker

#5. Worpswede, Worpswede, I cannot get you out of my mind ... Your magnificent pine trees! I call them my men
thick, gnarled, powerful, and tall
yet with the most delicate nerves and fibers in them.

Paula Modersohn-Becker

#6. I think the time is coming for struggle and uncertainty. It comes into every serious and beautiful life. I knew all along that it had to come.

Paula Modersohn-Becker

#7. We cleave to the past too much in Germany. All of our German art is too bogged down in the conventional ... I think more highly of a free person who consciously puts convention aside.

Paula Modersohn-Becker

#8. I believe that one should not think too much about nature when painting, at least not during the painting's conception. The colour sketch should be made exactly as one has perceived things in nature. But personal feeling is the main thing.

Paula Modersohn-Becker

#9. I must learn to express the gentle vibration of things: the intrinsically rough texture. I must find this expression in drawings; in the way in which I draw my nudes here in Paris, more original and at the same time sensitively observed.

Paula Modersohn-Becker

#10. Nature is supposed to become greater to me than people. It ought to speak louder from me. I should feel small in the face of nature's enormity.

Paula Modersohn-Becker

#11. I want to give colors intoxication, fullness, excitement, power by trying to forget Impressionism.

Paula Modersohn-Becker