For the Sake of a Single Verse is a portfolio of 24 lithographs from the Haggerty Museum of Art鈥檚 collection created by artist Ben Shahn. The prints illustrate a select passage from Rainer Maria Rilke鈥檚 only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). This semi-autobiographical novel tells the story of a college student from an aristocratic Danish family living in destitution in Paris in the early 1900s. The book made a profound and lasting impression on Shahn. Although Shahn first read the novel while visiting Paris in the 1920s, he didn鈥檛 create the illustrations until 1968鈥攁 year before his death.
Ben Shahn was born in Lithuania in 1898 to an Orthodox Jewish family. As a child, he witnessed anti-Semitism and political persecution, including the arrest and imprisonment of his socialist father. In 1906, he immigrated with his family to New York, where he lived for the majority of the rest of his life. Shahn was a painter and printmaker, whose work most often focused on social and political concerns. He is known as a leading figure of the social realism movement.
Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875. He is revered as one of the greatest German-language lyric poets of all time. Rilke published his first book of poetry at the age of 19. He traveled extensively and had numerous influences, from Leo Tolstoy and Friedrich Nietzsche to Charles Baudelaire. He was also strongly influenced by visual art and artists, particularly Paul C茅zanne and August Rodin, whom he befriended while living in Paris between 1902 and 1914.
The exhibition and accompanying programs are presented in part through generous support from Dr. Mary Anne Siderits, partnering sponsor. Additional support is provided by the Emmett J. Doerr Endowment Fund and the Joan Pick Endowment Fund.
