Her father, Carl Woldemar Becker (1841–1901), the Odessa born son of a Russian university professor of French, was employed as an engineer with the German railway.

Her mother, Mathilde (1852–1926), was from the aristocratic von Bültzingslöwen family, and her parents provided their children a cultured and intellectual household environment.

In 1861, Oskar Becker, Carl's brother, in an unsuccessful assassination attempt, had shot King Wilhelm of Prussia in the neck.

[5] The King was not severely injured, and Oskar was pardoned five years later for the crime (on condition that he permanently leave the country), but the constraints of opportunity for Carl Becker's family would linger.

In 1888 the family moved from Dresden to Bremen, where Carl Becker had obtained a position on the building board of the Prussian Railway Administration.

The family interacted with Bremen's local artistic and intellectual circles, and Paula began to learn to draw.

[6] While living with a maternal aunt in London, Becker received her first instruction in drawing at St John's Wood Art School.

Paula additionally used her Berlin time to visit its art museums, studying the works of German and Italian artists.

[6] An encounter with an important proponent for German feminism, Natalie von Milde, made a deep impression, although swift intervention from her family cut that connection short.

She convinced her family to allow her to attend a further course of study at the nearby artists’ colony in the northern German town of Worpswede.

The colony had begun when Mackensen and Heinrich Vogeler had retreated to the countryside, partly as a protest against the domination of the art academy style and life in the big city, and also to save on expenses.

At this time she began close friendships with the sculptor Clara Westhoff (1875–1954), the painter Ottilie Reylaender (1882-1965), and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926).

[10] While the community at Worpswede "remained rooted in romanticized traditions of landscape, her own artistic interests were shifting noticeably toward Paris and leaving her feeling increasingly alienated.

By December of that year, Becker, having come into a small inheritance, followed her friend there, and in 1900 she began study anatomy at the Académie Colarossi in the Latin Quarter.

Otto Modersohn, a Worpswede painter who had been an on-and-off resident of the colony since 1897, arrived in town with mutual friends to attend.

During her stays in Paris in 1905 and 1906, she lived in her studio on Avenue du Maine, where she created, among other things, portraits of Clara (Rilke-)Westhoff and Clara's husband Rainer Maria Rilke.In a letter to Rilke written from Worpswede on 17 February 1906, Becker wrote: "And now, I don't even know how I should sign my name, I'm not Modersohn and I'm not Paula Becker anymore either".

Despite her sister's and mother's general disapproval of Paula's decision to leave Otto for Paris, her relocation there proved to be quite prosperous.

During her final trip to Paris in May 1906, she wrote a letter to her elder sister, Milly Rohland-Becker, in which she stated, "I am becoming somebody – I'm living the most intensively happy period of my life."

[18] She worked in tempera and oil with a limited palette range of pigments such as zinc white, cadmium yellow, viridian, and synthetic ultramarine.

[citation needed] In 1908, on the first anniversary of her death, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote the renowned poem "Requiem for a Friend" in Modersohn-Becker's memory.

[6] On the tenth anniversary of her death, in 1917, the Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover organized a large exhibition of Becker's works and published a selection of her letters and diaries, which told her life, feelings and friendships, as well as the thoughts that shaped her art.

After Roselius's secretary Barbara Goette intervened on his behalf with Hitler, the street's buildings were allowed to remain as a monument of "degenerate art".

[26] To form the core of the foundation, Mathilde Modersohn donated more than 50 paintings and 500 drawings from her personal collection, which she had inherited through her mother's estate.

The purpose of the foundation is to "enhance the knowledge of the artist by researching and cataloguing her complete works," and to protect the integrity of her corpus.

Modersohn-Becker's house in Bremen, where she spent much of her life, opened in October 2007 as a private art museum and gallery.