My grandmother Dora grew up as one of 11 children on a small holding in Lower Saxony; her parents worked the lands for large estate owners, and had a small plot of their own to feed the ever growing family, a hard life. The soil is sandy there, not very fertile, with large swaths of heather, juniper and crooked birch woods; you can look at paintings of that landscape if you visit the museums in what remains of one of the preeminent artist colonies in Germany, Worpswede. http://www.worpswede-museen.de/en/kolonie-kuenstler/colony-and-artists.html

These days the most famous visual artist from that village is Paula Becker Modersohn, who was heads and shoulders ahead of her time, a precursor to German expressionism. She was a rebel, lover of Rainer Maria Rilke and, it is rumored, his wife Clara, wife to Otto Modersohn, tragically dead of a postpartum embolism at age 31. She sold perhaps one painting in her lifetime, surrounded by a bunch of more or less talented landscape painters who ruled the day. There are more than ten biographies about her, none of which I could find in English translation and she now has her very own museum in Bremen.

Worpswede is a big tourist attraction, lovingly restored, with museums, historical homes, pretty pine forests. A recent German novel, Concert without Poet, that depicts the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s bad boy days in Worpswede became a national bestseller and serves as yet another draw for the curious. It undercuts the narrative of the happy big family of artists in prewar times, and dishes out juicy gossip. Another untranslated novel, The Man who fell through the Century, describes the involvement of several colony artists with Naziism, dealing another blow to the Worpswede hagiography. In any event, the village is off the beaten path from the cities most Americans plan to visit, but a true locus of German art history.

The lead montage is based on a sculpture by Bernhard Hötger, the other montage on an excerpt of a Becker Modersohn painting of a little village girl. The panting below is a sketch by one of my favorite male artist of that Worpsweder group, Hans am Ende.