Ekphrastic Poetry: Part Three, Portrait of the Artist

Quite a few of the poems in my book Will There Be Music? contemplate the artist more than the works themselves, and in some cases they focus on the subject of rather public art. In part two of this series I mentioned a game I had made up to mimic the pose of figures in Henry Moore's works. My husband Bill became an early convert to this game, aptly copying the "lean" of Jean-Paul Sartre in the statue of him by Roseline Granet outside the Bibliothèque Nationale. I had always imagined the fragility of the man being pictured here "marching against the wind and rain." My  poem about him remarks upon the writer's melancholia, and the irony of his known intolerance for statues of famous people. I learned later he was not really fighting a true storm, but that the sculpture was made from looking at a photograph of him, taken on a beach in Lithuania, where he was trying to evade crowds of onlookers.

Sometimes it is not exactly a work of art that inspires a poem, it might be a death mask ("Nietzsche's Death Mask") or a desk left behind in a California mansion ("Franz Werfel in California, 1945"). One of the artists who has been a constant influence ever since I discovered him in a class on twentieth-century art is Emil Nolde, a complex figure whose works span the period from the 1880s to the 1950s. Nolde was born in a region claimed back and forth by both Denmark and Germany, but he always felt he was German, and many of his early paintings championed old Germanic myths and folk figures. This got him into trouble with the Nazi regime which interpreted these images as "degenerate," and banned his works from museums, and prohibited him from painting at all. Nolde himself espoused anti-semitic views, a viewpoint he later tried to expunge from his memoirs. My poem "Painted Into a Corner" celebrates his landscapes, which I have always found to be spectacular ("red skies all but overwhelming the naval blue mountains below them"), as well as his expressionist works ("those wild women shaking their naked bodies in a primitive dance").

Emil Nolde, Dance Around
the Golden Calf, 1910

Emil Nolde, En Meer