The catalogue to Making Modernism opens with an acknowledgment from the Royal Academy’s first female president, Rebecca Salter, that in the past it has overlooked women artists. To compensate, it has bundled seven – four headliners and three of their lesser-known contemporaries – into this one show.

Excluded from official art schools and reliant on private tuition and ‘ladies’ academies’, these seven women escaped the feminine curse of the three ‘Ks’ – Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen and church) – to forge independent careers in Germany before the first world war. They didn’t constitute an art movement, though Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin – both comfortably off – facilitated one. Every avant-garde movement needs a base, preferably with hospitality provided, and German expressionism was generously supplied with two in Werefkin’s ‘pink salon’ in Munich and Münter’s Bavarian holiday home in Murnau. It was in Murnau, where Münter and Wassily Kandinsky spent pre-war summers with Werefkin and Alexei Jawlensky in what became known as ‘the Russians’ House’, that the seeds of The Blue Rider were sown.

The Italian Erma Bossi was drawn into the Russians’ orbit, but the other artists here had little in common. Paula Modersohn-Becker, who married the traditional landscape painter Otto Modersohn after joining the rural artists’ colony of Worpswede, developed her own particular form of modernism during four extended stays in Paris. Jacoba van Heemskerck took lessons from Mondrian in the Dutch artists’ colony of Domburg before converting to Kandinskyesque abstraction. Käthe Kollwitz, socialist wife of a general practitioner serving factory workers in Berlin, had no connection with the other six artists; apart from a couple of woodcuts in the exhibition, her work can hardly be described as modernist.

In a mixed bag of 68 works it’s hard to get a grip on the different artists, especially when, like Werefkin, they keep changing styles. Lautrec meets Munch in Werefkin’s green-tinged ‘At the ‘Café’ (1909), seen as if through the bottom of an absinthe glass, while the black-clothed trudging figures and lurid lighting of ‘The Return’ (1909) could be the work of L.S. Lowry on acid. Münter is more stylistically consistent, couching domestic themes in expressionist colours. Her Murnau interiors offer charming insights into the human side of modernism. In one Kandinsky mansplains to Bossi at the dining table, gesticulating while she leans on her elbows; in another we glimpse him in bed in the room next door.

Individual works stand out. One is Münter’s wild-eyed ‘Portrait of a Boy (Willi Blabb)’ (1908-09), clutching defensively at his jacket while desperately manspreading in an attempt to disguise his terror of the female gaze. Another is ‘Beta Naked’ (c.1900), an extraordinary portrait of a prepubescent girl by the precociously talented Ottilie Reylaender. Arriving in Worpswede in 1898, aged just 15, Reylaender had been taken under the wing of Modersohn-Becker, the colony’s self-appointed procuress of local life models. Villagers had previously appeared as staffage in the work of Worpswede’s male landscape painters, but Modersohn-Becker got up close and personal, persuading their families to sit and bribing their children to strip. Her ‘Seated Nude Girl, Legs Pulled Up’ (c.1904) looks utterly miserable. Was this child abuse? It was certainly modernism. In a 15-year career tragically cut short in 1907 by complications from childbirth, Modersohn-Becker painted more than 50 nudes. Her approach was radical. ‘Mother with Child on her Arm, Nude II’ (1906) has a good claim to be considered the first nude mother and child in western art; its simple forms seemingly carved from paint anticipate Henry Moore by 20 years.

Modersohn-Becker might have made a better sculptor. The claggy paint that gives her forms solidity lacks expression, making her figures appear stolid as well solid: ‘Nude Girl with Flower Vases’ (c.1907) is as nerveless as a rag doll. She comes off badly in a gallery shared with Kollwitz, who never lets you forget the skeleton under the flesh. The year after the ‘Self-portrait’ (1889) that opens this show, Kollwitz decided to devote herself to the graphic arts, and beside her sober monochrome the expressionist palettes of her contemporaries can look lightweight. Alongside examples of the prints for which she is best known, the show features several personal drawings, including two of lovers from the ‘Secreta’ series never shown in her lifetime. Love and death go hand-in-hand in the work of this doctor’s wife who witnessed families torn apart by preventable diseases of the poor. Her etching ‘Woman with Dead Child’ (1903), for which she posed with her younger son Peter, is a modern Pietà.

In the show’s catalogue, the curator Dorothy Price asks what we can learn by looking at modernism through the lens of these artists’ gendered experiences. But does their gender matter? It didn’t to Werefkin, who declared in her diary: ‘I am not a man, I am not a woman, I am myself.’

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