The radio feature is a reading
from and discussing the background to 'Girl in White', Sue Hubbard's new novel on the
artist Paula Modersohn Becker :
THE
THURSDAY BOOK : THE INDEPENDENT
29th November 2912
GIRL
IN WHITE
Sue
Hubbard
By
Jonathan Taylor
“In
art,” the Expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) declared,
“one is usually totally alone with oneself.” For a female artist in the early
20th century, such aloneness was radical in itself. It is
Modersohn-Becker’s radical alones, as artistic pioneer and independent woman,
which particularly fascinates Sue Hubbard in her new novel, a fictionalised
account of the artist’s life.
In Girl
in White, Modersohn-Becker’s life is portrayed as a series of struggles to
assert independence, or “aloneness”, freeing herself from the conventions of
German art, from financial dependence on men, and from the binds of family
life. In all these struggles, she is only half-successful, never satisfied that
her paintings quite attain her aesthetic vision.
During
her most productive period – her last stay in Pars – she is destitute, and
repeatedly compelled to appeal for financial aid from others, including her
estranged husband. Ultimately, she returns from Paris to her husband in
Germany, forced by history into this “compromise”. As one character puts it, “I
don’t believe the world is yet ready for a woman artist to make it alone.”
Yet is
it precisely this “aloneness” that is a perquisite for art. “Art without pain,
without sacrifice, without loneliness," says Rainer Maria Rilke, one
of Modersohn-Becker’s lovers, is “impossible”. It is the impossibility of
Modersohn-Becker’s position – torn between the loneliness of art and enforced
selflessness of her role as a wife – that destroys her. After returning to her
husband, she falls pregnant, and dies shortly after childbirth.
The
power of Hubbard’s novel for contemporary readers is in its distillation of
dilemmas which, of course, are still pressing for women today. As Rilke wrote
of Modersohn-Becker in his great poem “Requiem”, it is her spirit which, of all
his dead friends, most seems to haunt the future.
Jonathan
Taylor is the author of the novel ‘Entertaining Strangers’ (Salt) and the
memoir ‘Take Me Home: Parkinson’s, My Father, Myself (Granta)
Order
for £8.99 (free p&P from The Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030
Thank you to Sue Hubbard for sending us this information.
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