Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English
Categories
Weblink
http://www.suehubbard.com

GIRL IN WHITE

Sue Hubbard

"Girl in White is a triumph of literary and artistic understanding, a tour du force: Masterly, moving and beautifully written. Hubbard goes where few dare go, and succeeds. You are the less for not reading it." -- Fay Weldon

"Imagine a chest of drawers - unopened for a hundred years... A woman opens the drawers, unfolds what she finds and, as she does so, the garments become stories... of some exceptional, lonely paintings, which had a considerable influence on 'modern' German art... those intimate folds become interstices of History... I recommend this haunting book..."
-- John Berger

It is Germany, 1933. A young musician, Mathilde, finding herself pregnant by her Jewish lover forced to flee Berlin, returns to the remote village where her mother died days after her birth. There she begins to unravel the story of her life; that of the Expressionist painter Paula Modersohn Becker. Leaving her bourgeois family, Paula went to live in a community of artists in Worpswede on the wild north German moors. There, she witnessed the downtrodden lives of peasants, married the older painter Otto Modersohn, a marriage that soon became an emotional and creative prison, and met the young poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom she had a complex and intense relationship. Caught between a desire to embrace the new movements in art and the obligations of marriage, she left Otto to pursue her career in Paris with no means of support, Through the eyes of Mathilde, we see Paula's struggle to achieve independence and recognition as an artist.

Sue Hubbard's narrative not only reveals Paula's vibrant personality and legacy of extraordinary paintings but also gives insight into the corrupted thinking behind the Third Reich, in this moving meditation on love, loss, memory and hope.

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and freelance art critic. She has published three poetry collections, a collection of short stories, Rothko's Red, (Salt), a novel, Depth of Field, (Dewi Lewis) and a book of art essays, Adventures in Art (Other Criteria). Sue has written regularly for The Independent, The New Statesman and many of art magazines. She was awarded a major Arts Council Award to support the writing of this book.
Available products
Book

Published 2012-09-01 by Cinnamon Press