Vatican Museums

An artist considered “degenerate” by the Nazi regime, Paula Modersohn-Becker was educated in London and Germany, but her encounters with the work of Cézanne, Gauguin and van Gogh during a stay in Paris in 1900 caused a clear deviation in her painting and accentuated her interest in primitive cultures. Her imaginative repertoire was particularly influenced by African art and, in particular, the iconography of the Goddess of fertility, which seeps into many of her portraits of women. This Annunciation is an example of this tendency; the painter offers an intimate version of the moment in which the angel encounters the Virgin, made disconcerting by the total absence of features. The artist died shortly after childbirth at just 31 years of age.