Three children with goat in the birch forest 1904

Paula Modersohn-Becker made this painting of three children with a goat amidst a birch forest with oil on canvas. Look at the surface, it's like she's wrestling with the paint. The color palette is so earthy, like straight from the forest floor. The paint is applied in such thick, deliberate strokes you can almost feel the texture of the canvas beneath. There's this tension between representation and abstraction. The figures are recognizable, but they're also flattened, stylized, almost like wood carvings. Take the birch tree on the left, notice how she captures the texture of the bark with these short, choppy brushstrokes, layering whites and grays. The layering of the paint and the marks of the brush become as important as the image itself, emphasizing the process of making. She reminds me of the early Fauves in her bold use of color and simplified forms, but there's also something distinctly modern about her vision, a proto-expressionist sensibility that anticipates artists like Kirchner or Heckel. There's a sense of rawness, of unmediated emotion, that's both unsettling and deeply compelling.