Two girls standing on the birch trunk 1902

Paula Modersohn-Becker made this painting, Two Girls Standing on the Birch Trunk, with oil on canvas. Look at those muted blues and browns, all scrubbed into the canvas, with the stark white trunk cutting through. You can almost feel Paula right there, can’t you? Just slathering on the paint, maybe trying to capture the weight of those dark dresses against the lightness of the tree. It’s like she’s wrestling with the paint, pushing it around to make these sturdy, solemn figures appear. There is such an earthiness here, linking those girls to the landscape itself. See how the colors from the background bleed into the foreground, smudging the girls and the tree together? That gives you a hint of what Modersohn-Becker was doing. This is connected to the way other artists of her generation were exploring how painting could capture not just what things look like, but how they feel. You can see that impulse in other painters, like Van Gogh, and in her friend, the sculptor Clara Westhoff. It’s all one big conversation, isn't it?