Modern Female Painters

Join us in celebrating the 150th birthday of Mathilde Vollmoeller-Purrmann alongside Gabriele Münter and Paula Modersohn-Becker. For the first time, the works of these female painters enter into a dialogue. The focus is on Mathilde Vollmoeller-Purrmann, whose career reached its zenith in Paris as a student of Henri Matisse. After marrying the painter Hans Purrmann and starting a family, she withdrew from the professional art world. Since her rediscovery, numerous exhibitions have honored Mathilde Vollmoeller-Purrmann as a significant pioneer of modernism. High-caliber loans and works from the Purrmann-Haus Museum demonstrate that these three female artists developed entirely individual visual languages in their quest for new forms of expression and created works of timeless power and beauty: Mathilde Vollmoeller in her engagement with Impressionism and Fauvism, Gabriele Münter as a central figure of the “Blue Rider,” and Paula Modersohn-Becker under the influence of the Worpswede artists’ colony and the Parisian avant-garde. The exhibition brings together outstanding works of art with moving biographies and offers new perspectives on women’s emancipation.