Self-portrait in front of a green background with a blue iris

Paula Modersohn-Becker's 1900 self-portrait against a green background with a blue iris is a significant early work by one of the most original artists of the early German modern movement. Modersohn-Becker was training in the Worpswede artists' colony in Lower Saxony at this time, absorbing the landscape painting of Fritz Mackensen and Otto Modersohn while developing a figurative sensibility that owed more to Cézanne and Gauguin than to the Worpswede tradition. The iris beside the face has symbolic resonance — iris was associated in northern European symbolism with both mourning and spiritual purity — but Modersohn-Becker's treatment is more formally than iconographically motivated. The Kunsthalle Bremen holds the largest collection of her work.

The portrait is organized as a set of simplified color areas — the green background, the blue iris, the warm flesh of the face — with form built through reduced, Cézannesque planar modeling rather than academic tonal gradation. The simplified handling and flattened spatial relationships signal her move away from the naturalist Worpswede tradition toward a more structurally ambitious painting practice.