The Book Beat reading group selection for June is Girl in White by Sue Hubbard. We will meet virtually online via Zoom on Wednesday, June 26 at 7 p.m. The Zoom link will be sent on the afternoon of the meeting to anyone interested in attending. Please call or Email bookbeatorders@gmail.com to sign up. The Book Beat reading group features international works in translation, and discussions are free and open to the public. Please call (248) 968-1190 for more information.
The Painter Paula Modersohn-Becker is currently the subject of her first major restrospective in America opening in June at the Neue Galerie in New York City. We hope Girl in White will help inform an interesting discussion around her life as an artist and her role in art history. Read more on our post: Reading and Seeing Paula Modershon-Becker.
Girl in White is the extraordinary story of the German expressionist painter Paula Modershohn-Becker (1876-1907), told in alternating chapters from the perspective of her grown daughter Mathilde and Paula. Written with the eye of a painter and the soul of a poet this moving story is a meditation on love, loss, memory and, ultimately, hope.
Paula Modersohn-Becker was a pioneer of modern art in Europe, but denounced as degenerate by the Nazis after her death. Poet and art critic Sue Hubbard draws on the artist’s diaries and paintings to bring to life her singular existence, her battle to achieve independence and recognition and her intense relationship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and her struggle to find a balance between being a painter, wife, and mother.
“A triumph of literary and artistic understanding, a tour de force: Masterly, moving and beautifully written.”
— Fay Weldon
“I discovered Paula in the mid 90s when my first poetry collection, Everything Begins with the Skin, was published. I was invited to give a reading in Bremen and visited Worpswede, the village where she lived in an artists’ community on the north German moors. I was taken by the landscape and the directness of the paintings and began to find out about her.” -from an interview with Sue Hubbard at 3 Quarks Daily
Sue Hubbard is a freelance art critic, novelist and poet. She has published five collections of poetry, Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon), Ghost Station and The Forgetting and Remembering of Air (Salt), Swimming to Albania (Salmon Poetry) and Radium Dreams (Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge) in collaboration with the artist Eileen Cooper RA that also formed a major exhibition.
Her novels include: Depth of Field, (Dewi Lewis), Girl in White (Cinnamon and Pushkin Press), and the highly acclaimed Rainsongs, (Duckworth, Overlook Press US, Mercure de France and Yilin Press, China). Flatlands, her fourth novel, is due from Pushkin Press and Mercure de France in June 2023. Rothko’s Red, her collection of short stories, was published by Salt.