A German Artist Colony, Suspended in Time, Stakes a Place in the Contemporary Scene

“How large the eyes become here! They want at all times to possess the whole sky,” wrote the young poet Rainer Maria Rilke in 1900. He had just arrived at Worpswede, the fabled artist colony on a stretch of German moorland so flat it becomes almost round as the view curves along the earth’s surface with scarcely a foothill, mountain or other perpendicular obstruction in sight.

Having just celebrated its 125th anniversary, a lot has changed in Worpswede since Rilke’s day. Last year, the colony used European Union funding to complete a 10 million-euro restoration of the village and expand four of its six museums. And two years ago, an ambitious residency program for contemporary artists called Die Kolonie — imagine Marfa in Germany — sprang up to replace its 40-year-old predecessor, Künstlerhäuser Worpswede, which lost funding in 2009.

At the same time, almost nothing has changed. Two world wars and a major modernization later, the town’s quirky Expressionist architecture and dramatic natural scenery — white birch trees and black, peat-sodden lakes — have been continuously luring creative souls to its soil since 1889. That year the disillusioned young Dusseldorf painter Fritz Mackensen felt an almost mystical connection to the moors. He convinced his friends that Worpswede was the antidote to urban industrialization and, by the turn of the century, it had become one of Germany’s premier artistic breeding grounds — literally.

It was there that Rilke fell in love with his future wife, the sculptor Clara Westhoff, while the wunderkind portraitist Paula Becker married Otto Modersohn, a landscape painter. This grand tradition of artist love stories has carried on for generations since. During the colony’s second creative renaissance in the 1960s, the artist Friedrich Meckseper moved from Berlin and married the local photographer Barbara Müller. The great-niece of colony co-founder Heinrich Vogeler, Müller gave birth to their daughter, Josephine, three years later.

Today, Josephine Meckseper is one of the most prominent artists to come out of Worpswede yet. “It became clear quickly that I was going to be an artist,” she says. “When art is such a natural vocabulary in your life, there wasn’t much of a decision.” But Meckseper, who has been living in New York since 1992, is also not the first artist of her generation to leave. The population in Worpswede is aging, and the museums have emphasized historical work.

The Amsterdam-based curator Tim Voss wants to change that. Since launching Die Kolonie in 2013, he has staged a symposium on “Psycho Materialism” and hosted 16 contemporary artists from London, Taiwan and beyond to work out of the colony’s five rural studios. Next year a group of West African artists will team up with artists from Berlin to create a joint film, “Worpswede: A Character’s Quest.” Die Kolonie hasn’t always been an easy sell. Tourists want to see historical paintings, while “contemporary art is totally alien” to locals, Voss says. “But it’s very important to do these things — otherwise Worpswede won’t have a future as a place for art production. But compared to other cities where I’ve worked, the good thing here is that I don’t have to convince people of the value of art. They say, ‘We don’t know anything about it anymore, but we understand this tradition, so please do these alien things here.’”

But the outsiders drawn to Worpswede by Voss’s initiatives aren’t the only ones spurring new interest in the colony. “Germans are rediscovering it, because it is such a fascinating, unusual place to visit,” Meckseper says. “And the landscape — it really is stunningly beautiful.”