Jörg Maaß - Ernst Barlach

barlach Ernst Barlach (1870-1938)

Ernst Barlach was born outside of Hamburg but raised in various villages in Holstein, whose flat lowlands made a great impression on him. He studied at the Gewerbeschule in Hamburg and then continued his studies in Dresden. He spent a year in Paris at the Academie Julian in 1895-96 and it was there that he determined that his gifts lay in sculpture.

In 1899, he moved to Berlin but in 1901 he returned to Wedel where he earned a living designing ceramics for the Mutz factory. He moved back to Berlin in 1905. In 1906 he suffered a personal crisis by becoming embroiled in a lawsuit with a woman over custody of their illegitimate son.

To escape these pressures, he traveled to Russia to visit his brother who was working for an industrial company in the Ukraine. The impact of the Russian peasants and the huge empty landscape changed his style dramatically from a provincial derivation from Jugendstil patterning to a new monumental simplification with pronounced elements of caricature. On his return to Berlin, he took up sculpture again, carving now directly into wood as well as modelling in clay. In order to transfer the monumentality he was seeking into his drawings, for a short time he used his own sculptured figures as models.

By 1910, he had achieved the style which was to remain essentially unaltered through the rest of his life and he enjoyed considerable critical and commercial success. In 1907, he joined the Berlin Secession and signed a contract with the famous dealer, Paul Cassirer, to sell him his entire output in return for a fixed salary. In 1909, he received the Villa Romana price which took him to Florence for ten months. On his return, he settled in Gustrow where he would remain for the rest of his life.

In addition to sculpting, Barlach wrote several plays. His first attempt at printmaking were lithographic illustrations to accompany a play he wrote in 1907 entitled "Der tote Tag" (The Dead Day). Barlach produced many lithographs, some which were to accompany the other six plays he wrote, as well as woodcuts executed between 1918-19.

Barlach's notoriety as an author, sculptor, draughtsman and printmaker made him an obvious target for the Nazis. In 1937, his art was branded "degenerate" and 381 works were expelled from German museums. He was forbidden to publish or exhibit and was forced to resign from the Berlin Akademie. He died in 1938. (Paraphrased from The Print in Germany: 1880-1933 by Frances Carey and Antony Griffiths).