Making Modernism at the RA: ‘expressionism from a woman’s perspective’

In recent years, the story of modernism has had “a top-to-bottom overhaul”, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Art historians have “switched attention” from the largely white, male figures long seen as the movement’s canonical heroes to focus on “lesser-known, formerly excluded figures” – notably female artists.

This exhibition, “a survey of expressionism from a woman’s perspective”, is “the latest example of this tendency” – and it is very impressive. The show concentrates on four women artists active in early 20th century Germany: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Käthe Kollwitz, Gabriele Münter and Marianne von Werefkin.

It examines how they gave to subjects such as self-portraiture, landscape and still-life a distinctly female perspective that is a counterpoint to that of their more celebrated male peers, such as Münter’s partner Wassily Kandinsky. The result is a fascinating display – an “excellent essay in rediscovery”.

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One artist “stands out like a raw wound”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) was a “genius” whose art “leaps at you out of its own time”. Working primarily in printmaking, Kollwitz focused on the time-honoured subjects of great art: “bodily existence, spiritual longings, life and death”. A stark woodcut print from 1929 sees “a mother and child sleeping, hugging for warmth and safety in the dark”.

A lithograph from 1934 – soon after Hitler came to power – depicts Kollwitz’s own face, eyes staring out “black and hopeless”: it is as “timeless” as Rembrandt’s later self-portraits. The rest of the artists here, alas, simply cannot compete. And the title is misleading: few of them are cutting-edge modernists. Gabriele Münter (1877-1962), for instance, “depicts the Munich equivalent of Britain’s Bloomsbury set”: her portraits of Paul Klee and her lover Kandinsky, in “shorts and sandals”, are interesting curios, but they’re hardly revolutionary. Like so much here, it is “fascinating as history” – “but it does not grab us”.

If the show has a problem, it’s that it is too small, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. Charging £17 for an exhibition this small is “outrageous”. But the art that is included is excellent. The Russian-born von Werefkin (1860-1938), for example, is an expressionist working from what seems an “explicitly feminist viewpoint”: she depicts women “burdened with babies”, and nannies with “arsenical green faces”.

And who has ever painted like Paula Modersohn-Becker, an artist of “restless energy” who died in 1907 aged just 31? Her nude self-portrait of 1906 is an “epochal” work. Another “wonderful” image here is of two sturdy female hands “clasping a camomile flower”, an un-dainty vision of feminine friendship, defying “all the era’s ladylike conventions”. It is one of many highlights of an event that could have been considerably bigger.

Royal Academy, London W1. Until 12 February