Imagine in Britain a hangover of narrative Victorianism mingling with the last of the pre-Raphaelites and the first of the Bloomsberries, those free-living painters and handworkers who also had their Sussex countryside. Worpswede was a Wahlheimat, "a home region of choice", which remained untouched by politics as the well-off newcomers enjoyed it.

And then the German tragedy happened. If ever a play needed to be written about the early 20th-century German soul torn apart, friendships broken, families and homes lost, and so much of that conflict doubly invested in art and architecture, its title would be Worpswede. Not Worpswede as the "world-art village" which makes it the minor tourist attraction it is today, but Worpswede as the site of fateful historical and artistic testimony. While between 1895 and 1945 the German debate over how to be modern resulted in a global killing-field, Mackensen, Becker and Vogeler, these three in particular, set down their visions for a 20th century of artistic sensibility and material living. 

The latter two were consciously in flight from those posturing old devotees of heroes and battles in the name of the nationalist art, the Academy. Paula Modersohn-Becker, as she became known after marriage to the older Otto Modersohn, was as a woman anyway excluded, and revelled in her freedom to paint from nature. Village childen, friends and old women posed for her. Avowing a fundamental "tendency towards the primitive" that she found in early Modernism, on a trip to Paris she discovered van Gogh in his French phase, the later Gauguin, and classic Cézanne. Rilke who ardently admired Cézanne's still-lifes, portraits and landscapes, helped her find her way around artistic Paris. He detested her portrait of him because she caught his self-absorbed character so well. Paula's coolly knowing, psychologically acute self-portraits are probably her greatest legacy. With hints of an Expressionism to come she modernises Nordic beauty. Her individualism and love of human oddity earned her a place in Hitler's Degenerate Art exhibition in 1937: just one of those events that helps place Worpswede more widely in German history. 

The Nazis confiscated her 1905 Worpswede Peasant-Child from Bremen, where much of her best work is on display today. It was a token of their disapproval of a painter who was international in outlook, Modernist in style and, above all, her own person. She was in embryo everything a Germany geared to defend the interests of the peasantry and  the aristocracy against the cosmopolitanism of the expanding cities would soon curse. Artistically driven, she struggled with the demands of domestic life. See her Self-portrait with Swollen Belly, painted on the sixth anniversary of her marriage, which will go on returning the gaze of independent women indefinitely. She died suddenly in 1907 from an embolism after giving birth.  She was 31.