Kind in der Wiege

Kind in der Wiege (Child in the Cradle) from 1904, at the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal, depicts an infant in its cradle — a subject that carries Modersohn-Becker's interest in the earliest stages of human life. She was deeply concerned with what she called the great simplicities — birth, childhood, the body, the earth, death — and infancy represented the closest approximation to the unmediated bodily existence she sought to represent. The Von der Heydt Museum holds an important collection of German art from the modern period, and this intimate work fits within its representation of the Worpswede circle's approach to figurative subject matter.

The infant in the cradle is painted with simplified, rounded forms — the swaddled body reduced to a single warm mass within the geometric lines of the cradle's wood. The palette is warm and intimate, appropriate to the domestic tenderness of the subject.