Article
Ernst Barlach, artist
Barlach's highly individual style makes him difficult to categorize. He is generally referred to as an Expressionist, a label he rejected. His work, which combines a sim plified realism with strong abstract features, includes pieces of intense drama, but more usual are works of undemonstrative reflec tion, and even his most violent figures are composed of large planes that convey a geometric clarity.The organizers of the exhibition Paris, Berlin at the Centre Pompidou in 1992 probably put it best when they characterized his work as being "near but at the edge of expressionism."
Besides creating many sculptures in wood, bronze, and porcelain, examples of which are shown in the exhibition, Barlach was also a prolific and highly original graphic artist. Among his interests was the narrative potential of graphic art, and he drew many sequences or series, among them images that illustrated and interpreted poetic and dramatic works of others. The exhibition includes two of these series: Barlach's woodcuts to the Walpurgis Night scene of Goethe's Faust, published both as a portfolio and with Goethe's text as a book, and his drawings of the thirteenth-century Song of the Nibelungen, a work of iconic power in German history and culture. The medieval ideal of absolute loyalty between ruler, lord, and ruled, down to the lowest serf, which the poem conveys in the dramatic account of the murder of Siegfried and the revenge taken by his widow, became a nationalistic ideal in nineteenth-century Germany.
During and after the First World War, right wing movements corrupted the poem to serve as a political ideal for modern Germans. Barlach admired the work's poetic power; but rather than glorifying its characters, his drawings reveal them as slaves of false standards of the twentieth century, obedience to which lead to the destruction of their world. His humanistic values brought Barlach into conflict with National Socialism, and some years before his death his work was prohibited as degenerate and harmful to Germany.
Besides creating many sculptures in wood, bronze, and porcelain, examples of which are shown in the exhibition, Barlach was also a prolific and highly original graphic artist. Among his interests was the narrative potential of graphic art, and he drew many sequences or series, among them images that illustrated and interpreted poetic and dramatic works of others. The exhibition includes two of these series: Barlach's woodcuts to the Walpurgis Night scene of Goethe's Faust, published both as a portfolio and with Goethe's text as a book, and his drawings of the thirteenth-century Song of the Nibelungen, a work of iconic power in German history and culture. The medieval ideal of absolute loyalty between ruler, lord, and ruled, down to the lowest serf, which the poem conveys in the dramatic account of the murder of Siegfried and the revenge taken by his widow, became a nationalistic ideal in nineteenth-century Germany.
During and after the First World War, right wing movements corrupted the poem to serve as a political ideal for modern Germans. Barlach admired the work's poetic power; but rather than glorifying its characters, his drawings reveal them as slaves of false standards of the twentieth century, obedience to which lead to the destruction of their world. His humanistic values brought Barlach into conflict with National Socialism, and some years before his death his work was prohibited as degenerate and harmful to Germany.
