Girl in White [Kindle Edition]

Sue Hubbard's book is about an artist I previously knew little about. This powerfully poetic narrative interlaces fact with fiction, weaving backwards and forwards between the third-person narrative of German artist Paula Modelsohn-Becker and the first-person narrative of her daughter Mathilde.

The story follows Paula's passionate pursuit of truth through her art and the unflinching sacrifices she makes in order to realize her ambitions, at a time when women were not expected to put their art first. Her relationships with the poet Rilke and with Otto Modelsohn, who becomes her husband, pull her in opposing directions yet both are influential in her development. Mathilde, who loses her mother shortly after she was born, retraces Paula's footsteps in order to better understand her own identity.

Hubbard writes emotionally but never sentimentally. Her piercing visual descriptions make for intense reading. Bringing art to life on the page her words become paintings, her intuitions become vivid realities. I read this book like watching a film, seeing feeling and hearing everything.

Sue Hubbard is an established art critic and writer; I followed her art reviews in Time Out years ago, and her collected criticism - Adventures In Art (2010) - is some of the best since Robert Hughes'. So when she elects to write a novel based on a woman artist, you know it will be doubly authoritative, as John Berger, no less, testifies on the cover.
The artist is Paula Modersohn-Becker, a member of the Worpsweder community established at the end of the Nineteenth century which became the seedbed of the Expressionists. Paula Becker, who married another member of the group, Otto Modersohn, died too young - of an embolism soon after childbirth in 1907 - to fulfill her full potential, although her development was towards the objective classicism of Cezanne rather than the existential subjectivism that became the Expressionist movement.
Although familiar with some of her work, I knew little of Modersohn-Becker's life, so I can't tell how much of the narrative - apart from the documented trips to Paris, meetings with Rilke and Clara Westhoff, family life - is factual, how much is invented. And that is itself tribute to the way Hubbard weaves a seamless texture around those few givens, the texture of day-to-day life - in squalid but intoxicating Paris, on the peat moors of Worpswede, in the ordinary daily compromises of marriage and living.
There are some striking descriptive phrases in the texture: a "nose like a mistake"; a mouth like an unhealed wound; her dead father's expression - "as if he had just understood something important"; Rilke's pale complexion as if he had spent too much time in the moonlight. But Hubbard eschews fanciful writing as such, resists the temptation to use literary equivalents of Expressionism, wanting not to alienate the reader but draw them into the narrative, allowing the descriptions of Paula's own works - her paintings - to carry the emotional weight. In this she succeeds beautifully - I was hooked by the narration, and the fierce vulnerability of the character evoked.
But there is another strand, a further dimension. Paula's narrative, in the third person, is intercut by the first-person narrative of her daughter Mathilde, searching imaginatively for the mother she never knew. This is tactically significant for two reasons.
Firstly, Mathilde's journey from her home in Berlin to Worpswede takes place in 1933 - the beginning of the events that would turn the most lurid of the Expressionists' visions into reality. In fact, her journey is prompted by the loss of her lover, a Jewish musician forced into American exile. This suggests a wider interpretation of what the stolidly German Worpswede community were unconsciously seeking.
But secondly, it puts both author and reader in Mathilde's place, of knowing almost nothing of Paula beyond her work, of having to imaginatively construct her from those works and the few known details.
But that in turn accentuates the deftness with which Hubbard does just that; its ending, with Paula's conviction at her death that her approach to her vision is at last clear, returns us to the work, the paintings, and allows us to share that sense of artistic triumph. A triumph which is Hubbard's as well as Paula Modersohn-Becker's.
This is a compelling novel for anyone interested in art; and anyone who isn't, but loves good literature.

I began reading Sue Hubbard's book two nights ago and have already finished it. Such is the author's gift for bringing alive her two women protagonists, the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker and her daughter Mathilde, of evoking the atmosphere of the times in which they lived with an abundance of visual description. As biography, the narrative moves along fluently and gracefully, and the clever conceit of having the orphaned daughter reflect on her mother's life heightens the tragedy of the artist's early death.
Sue Hubbard is a wonderful poet, and her prose has the ability to get under your skin, generating intense feeling. She is also an excellent art critic, and in 'Girl In White' she paints beautiful images with her words, skilfully succeeding in making art itself into a protagonist. A pleasure from start to finish.