Image: Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen
An exhibition at the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen is scheduled for 14 November 2026 through 21 February 2027.
The second anniversary exhibition selects individual iconic portraits. Through them, it examines different levels of the works, ranging from the immediate reproduction of what is seen to symbolic condensation.
The exhibition will repeat a comparison first conducted in 2024, when the famous self-portrait was the focus of an experiment in the 3Sat series 'Das Geheimnis der Meister': painter Tim Ernst made a copy, and the programme concluded by comparing it with the original in Bremen.
Portraits of children from private and public collections, shown at the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum for the first time, will deepen the examination of their auratic quality; these images can seem both unsettling and moving, while raising questions about who the children are and what conception of childhood Modersohn-Becker intended to convey.
At least twelve paintings made between 1898 and 1907 depict Anna Schröder, while dozens of drawings of an old woman in a garden refer to the poorhouse resident. The museum owns 'The Old Woman from the Poorhouse in the Garden with Glass Ball and Poppies', identified as Modersohn-Becker’s last painting of Schröder, along with a group of preparatory drawings, and plans to show the available Schröder paintings together for the first time. Viewers will be asked whether a work’s aura can be experienced only in direct encounter with the original and what role the museum as a place plays in perception.
