Book Description
Revolving around the public and private lives of the great modern painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, this collection explores the artist's relationship with her craft and her friendship with poet Rainer Maria Rilke and his wife, sculptor Clara Westhoff. Inspired by the artist's numerous self-portraits, Bhatt transports the image of Modersohn-Becker to present-day Germany. This book-length sequence of poems presents a rich and fully conceived history of the inner and outer worlds of one of the century's great modern painters.
About the Author
Sujata Bhatt is the author of several volumes of poetry, including Monkey Shadows, The Stinking Rose, and Augatora. She lives in Bremen, Germany.
Colour for Solitude FROM THE PUBLISHER
This book-length sequence of poems takes us to the early twentieth-century, to Northern Germany, where a group of artists had founded a colony in Worpswede, a rural community near Bremen. Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) is the poet's quarry: a young, energetic woman, against all the odds she went her own way as a painter. Modersohn-Becker died shortly after giving birth to her one daughter, but left behind a substantial, remarkable body of work. She is one of the great modern painters of her century. Fascinated by the number of self-portraits, Sujata Bhatt imagines the painter's inner and outer worlds. The poems explore, too, Modersohn-Becker's friendship with Rilke ('Give me/a better colour/for solitude --') and Rilke's wife, her closest friend, the sculptor Clara Westhoff. Other poems in the sequence engage Modersohn-Becker in the present: Bhatt follows her into her own time in Worpswede and Bremen, where she lives.
Art & Photography
Book Info
