Still life with Apples

Still Life with Apples from 1903, at the Neue Nationalgalerie, is one of Modersohn-Becker's relatively rare forays into pure still-life painting, a genre she practiced alongside her figure work. Her approach to apples inevitably invites comparison with Cézanne, whose still lifes she studied carefully during her Paris trips. She had traveled to Paris multiple times from 1900 onward, specifically to absorb the lessons of Cézanne, Gauguin, and the Nabis that her Worpswede colleagues were mostly ignoring. This still life demonstrates that influence — the apples are treated as volumes in space, their roundness analyzed rather than described — while maintaining her characteristic directness.

The apples are rendered as pure geometric volumes — spheres resting on a flat surface — in the manner she absorbed from studying Cézanne. The color is warm and direct, the paint applied with decisive strokes that commit fully to each form.